by Mary Eicher
“A very pretty sister. But sad. Too sad. Make one cry to see this one.”
They knelt facing each other in the sand. Mesmerized by her companion, Artemis allowed her to untie the strings of her swimsuit. She closed her eyes and yielded to the warmth of the woman’s touch. The hands grew warmer still as they glided along her naked torso, caressing and eliciting trails of pleasure. Artemis savored the gentle touch, heat spreading along her skin and then deeper to her core.
The woman kissed her and laid her back onto the sand. Artemis remained completely still, consuming the woman’s touch, and letting desire slowly replace her pain. Desire swept beyond her barriers; craving overtopped the sadness like waves against the breakwater. When she was ready, when the need to break the chains became urgent, the woman entered her and brought her to release.
Then the woman ran her finger from Artemis’s collarbone to her navel, making twists and turns along the way. She was tracing the unalome, Artemis realized. She opened her eyes and stared into her companion’s beautiful island features, finding sparks of light dancing in the woman’s eyes. Pele!
The goddess of the islands leaned down and gave Artemis a final kiss.
“Ola I ka makana ma ke akua,” she whispered. Life is a gift. Then Pele stood and walked into the shadows.
Just before dawn, Artemis awoke ready to go home.
Chapter Fifteen
Governor Hemsley searched the pocket of his jacket for his reading glasses. There was a stack of papers in the center of his desk, and he was determined to fulfill every commitment on his calendar until election day. He was single-minded and driven, and although his grief was genuine, it was not all consuming. He had perfected his speech, and it played well with diverse audiences. However, the campaign was joyless work for him. He still found himself expecting Sarah to walk in the room with a suggestion or a cup of coffee or just a smile. But it was his chief of staff who walked in instead.
“Yo, Sam, got a minute?” Jim asked.
“Two if you need them.”
Jim handed the governor a cell phone. “It was Sarah’s,” he said. “Apparently, she didn’t take it with her to the church fair. I took the liberty of having it checked.”
Hemsley took the phone and pressed it between his hands. A memory of Sarah holding the phone to her ear filled his mind.
“Okay.” Jim stood silently staring at him, so Hemsley asked, “Did you find something unusual?”
Jim cleared his throat. “Um, we did. There are messages to a person identified as UME. They’re encrypted.”
“But you found a way to read them,” Hemsley guessed. He wondered why it was necessary for him to drag this out of his chief of staff.
“Yep. We did.”
Hemsley was getting annoyed. “Out with it, Jim. What the hell?”
“I can’t prove it, Sam. But I think she was communicating back and forth with Jamil Uberdorf. There are messages from someone signed UME. Sarah signed her messages with SME. They were communicating for more than four months, and the timing coincides with the cult’s activities. Sarah was providing information to the Servants of the Harbinger. It looks like she even approved their attacks.”
Hemsley stood stiffly and turned on the phone to scan through it. “I don’t see anything.”
“She was clever, Sam. The information is hidden and encrypted. I can show you if you want.”
“No, I don’t.” He set the phone on his desk. He thought for a few minutes. “Did she have anything to do with her own…with the fair?”
Jim put his hands in the coat pockets of his suit. “Yes. She approved it. She even told them the precise time to set off the explosions. I’m sorry, Sam, but Sarah knew.”
Bits and pieces of odd moments and inconsistencies in his wife’s behavior over the past months began to knit together in his mind. His wife’s mood swings at the time of Uberdorf’s escalations took on new meaning. He sat behind his desk and rested his head in his hands. Sarah had kept him from acting regarding the Harbinger cults, even the Harbinger rumors. She must have thought the turmoil an advantage to his incumbency. She had timed her death for maximum effect on the election.
“My God, Sarah,” he murmured, the sound of his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The depth of his feelings was as much a revelation to him as his wife’s activities.
He looked up at his chief of staff. “Find Jamil Uberdorf. Find out how he knew my wife and then kill him.”
*
Angie held onto her mother with one hand and onto her grandmother with the other. Her gait was growing steadier every day, but Lucy wouldn’t let her walk solo just yet. Angie stamped her feet and came to a sudden stop. “I don’t want to see the doctor anymore. I want to go home.”
Lucy leaned down and put her hand on her daughter’s pouty face. “I know, sweetie. But he is helping you get better. You want to get better and go back to school, don’t you?”
Angie nodded. “But I don’t need the doctor anymore. The lady told me I was going to be all better very soon.”
Lucy and her mother exchanged a puzzled glance. “What lady, Angie?”
Angie looked up at them. “The lady who talks to me in my head.”
The doctor dismissed the women’s concern, telling them not to pay much attention to the voice in Angie’s head. It was common for young children to have imaginary friends, and given what Angie had been through, it wasn’t surprising. He made a note of it for the record before putting Angie through a series of motor skill tests. He gave her a high five when they were done and told Lucy that Angie was healing faster than he’d expected.
On the drive home, Lucy’s mother sat in the back seat to talk with her granddaughter. They played the license plate game and laughed at silly jokes and talked about Angie going back to school.
“Has the lady told you anything else?” Claire asked casually.
Angie smiled. “Yes. She said I would see Temmie soon.”
*
Artemis slid the machinery in her new exercise room to one side and made a space for her practice mat. She began the jujitsu routine with swift, smooth movements that became faster and more aggressive as her muscle memory took over for her mind. She was adept at martial arts. She progressed to a flurry of judo kicks, practiced her jumps, and completed the exercise with five minutes of tae kwon do. She had designed the session herself, taking what she wanted from each discipline. The exercises focused on a balance of attack and defense; although, as Cab had once observed, she favored attack.
Her body glistening with sweat, Artemis grabbed a bottle of water and replaced the furniture. Her cell phone chirped as she walked to the living room, and she sank onto the sofa and swiped the screen. She had a spam message, which she promptly deleted. She was in no need of anything the marketer was selling. She drank the rest of the water and wiped sweat from her neck. She decided to try what Strang had inferred.
She set the phone on the coffee table, closed her eyes, and willed Lucy to call. She cleared her mind of everything but the image of Lucy on a phone. She focused intently and sent her thoughts into the universe, into the dark matter, out to the Great Rift.
But the phone remained obstinately silent. With a sigh, she got up and went to take a shower. Afterward she made a sandwich and opened the week’s mail as she ate. She decided to send the Strangs a book about the Greek gods as a thank-you, and she hoped she would see them again, both of them, perhaps at Christmas.
When she went back into the living room, she saw her cell was blinking. She had a text message. Her heart began to race as she jogged over to pick it up. The message was not from Lucy, but indicated it was from Lucy’s mother. As Artemis read it, she realized it wasn’t from Claire either. It was from Angie.
Ant temmie. pleese come see me. I gitting well and I miss you to much.
Artemis read it over and over. Her heart ached as she read it, and she smiled and frowned and laughed all at the same time. She composed half a dozen replies in her mind but didn’t think Angie would understand them.
So, she simply typed I will. I love you, and pressed send.
Figuring it was time to deal with all her personal heartaches, Artemis walked down the hall and opened the door to the spare bedroom where she had stored the boxes containing Cab’s belongings. She opened the first box and took out his books one by one. He was Ichabod Crane, she thought, reading the varied titles. Cab read everything: fiction, history, mysteries, even recipes. She put them on the bookshelf. She wanted to keep them. She would no doubt keep everything, even his clothes. But she would get these things out of the boxes and incorporated into her life. She was finally bringing Cab home.
She worked long into the night, treading memory lane a hundred times. It did not make her sad, she realized as she smiled at his silly collection of beer bottle caps. The happy memories were the ones that had endured. She had had the gift of Ichabod for nearly her whole life. He was part of her and always would be. When the final box was empty and the last memory was put away, Artemis went to bed and slept a deep, untroubled sleep.
*
The new ethos with its morbid fascination with death was accepted by most people either as a blessing or a curse. The new order was quieter than the old one, subdued and apprehensive. It was full of new ethical mores and time-consuming processes. And it was encased in suspicion. People were profoundly cynical of governments and religions that failed to protect or inspire them. They mistrusted their fellow man and themselves. The idea of a Harbinger had stripped away the veneer of altruism and exposed the face of self-indulgence.
“You are a hedonist, Rebecca,” a blond young man said to his pretty girlfriend.
“Naw, I’m just living day by day. And until I get infected, I’m going to enjoy life,” she corrected her boyfriend du jour.
He rolled his eyes. “That’s a hedonist.”
“Whatever.” She reclined on the deck of the sailboat and retreated behind her sunglasses. “Hand me my drink, will ya?”
They had been drinking all morning. Craig found Rebecca had a high tolerance for alcohol and a low tolerance for being bored. The daughter of a high-ranking official, Rebecca expected her whims to be serviced instantly. He set the drink beside her and told her not to spill it. She swatted his leg.
“You shouldn’t drink while boating,” he chided.
She leaned up on an elbow. “We’re in the marina, Craig, moored to the dock.”
He shrugged. Her father’s boat rarely left the marina, but Rebecca insisted on using it almost every day anyway. Craig didn’t really mind. He got to see her in a bikini and didn’t have to do any work since they weren’t actually sailing. He lay down beside her, close but not touching. Like the sailboat, she rarely went for a ride.
“Don’t you want to hear about my new job?”
“Not especially. But tell me if you must.” She squirmed the way he liked.
“I’m a Servant of the Harbinger!” he said proudly.
She tipped her sunglasses down and gave him a disapproving look. “Why?”
“They help people.” He put his hands beneath the back of his head and stretched. “I thought I might try that for once.”
“Bullshit, Craig. You’ve got some angle in mind or you wouldn’t be doing it. And I don’t think men in brown dresses are sexy. You should know that up front.” She rose again on her elbow and took a few swallows from her Bloody Mary.
He did have an angle, he admitted. Servants who made it to the top layers of the cult made big money. And he’d heard that the Servants were going into a new business, some sort of elixir or something. Craig figured if he got in on the ground floor of this new scheme, he’d have a good chance of getting promoted quickly.
Rebecca wished him luck and told him to put lotion on her back. He had no problem with that. Takes a hedonist to serve a hedonist, he told her. Rebecca didn’t particularly care.
*
Jamil Uberdorf had stopped texting his mentor. They had simply disappeared—maybe a victim of the Harbinger. The idea made him snicker. With his mentor AWOL Jamil was free to take the Servants where he wanted. And he had big plans. The newsletter was an online success. He had finally found the right people to give it the look and content he wanted. But handing out printed copies turned out to be a bust. People just tossed them in the trash or dropped them on the street. The internet was the way to go, he knew; that and his syndicated broadcasts, which were reaching epic numbers of viewers.
He took a swig from the odd-shaped bottle on his desk—his newest endeavor, Harbinger Health. It tasted sweet, maybe a little too sweet still. He frowned and took a critical look at the bottle in his hand. It was rectangular, ten inches high, two inches wide on all four sides. It was the same color brown as the robes the Servants wore. And it had their trademark symbol on the front label—a capital H topped with a halo. But the magic was the concoction inside. The bottle contained an elixir made of blended fruit juices, honey, and a hearty undisclosed dose of marijuana extract. It gave the drinker a nice high that came on slow and lingered.
If that were all there was to it, Uberdorf knew, the product would sell for about three bucks. However, there was much more to it than a simple high. The elixir was purported to have a very special quality: the ability to ward off the Harbinger. The label didn’t say that, of course. The prophylactic quality of the elixir was marketed via rumor and innuendo.
He had considered claiming the elixir was a cure, but that would be too easy to disprove. Since the unfortunate incident with Brandon, Uberdorf’s disbelief in the Harbinger had been shaken. It was a fact people were dying every day. But there was a world full of people who hadn’t heard the Harbinger and were eager to make sure they didn’t. That was where his particular genius came in. Desperate people were willing to spend lots of money on hope. He charged fifteen dollars a bottle, and based on test results, they were expected to fly off the shelves.
He removed the bottle’s pretty gold halo cap and took another swig. It tasted like success. The Servant, a recent hire, began to shift from foot to foot standing in front of his desk.
“Don’t get impatient, Craig,” Uberdorf chided him. “I’ll get to you in the Harbinger’s good time.”
“Yes, sir.” The man stood still.
Uberdorf drained the bottle and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Okay, what’s up?”
“We want to know how many bottles you need for the broadcast display.”
Uberdorf planned to promote the elixir heavily after the election, when advertising rates came back down and the damn politicians were off the air. He already had arrangements with Amazon to handle sales and distribution, and he had a handful of new recruits like the man in front of him all across the country to pitch the product directly.
“I’ll get back to you on that, my dearest friend,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. When the guy was gone, Uberdorf released a satisfying burp and helped himself to a fresh bottle.
*
Lucy allowed Angie to turn the knob and let Artemis in. Angie pulled free from her mother’s hand and wrapped her arms around their guest.
“Temmie!” she said as she got picked up. “I knew you would come.”
Artemis cradled Angie in her arms and kissed her forehead. “You don’t look sick,” she said with a smile. “You look perfect.”
Angie grinned, and Artemis noticed a slight sag on the right side of her face. She pressed Angie’s head against her shoulder and sighed as she turned to look at Lucy. “You look pretty perfect too,” she lied softly, but Lucy merely gave her a weak smile and turned her head.
“Temmie, my dear, how wonderful to see you,” Claire chimed in. “Come in. Come in.”
They gathered in the living room, and Angie sat on Artemis’s lap and played with her long black hair. Claire described the challenges Angie faced and gave a hope-filled prognosis that soothed Artemis’s heart. Lucy barely returned her glances. Artemis told them about her trip to Maui and promised Angie to take them all there as soon as she was completely well.
�
��That might be months or even years,” Lucy said pointedly.
“Or weeks,” Claire said with a smile. “One never knows. Angie is recovering so quickly.” She lifted her granddaughter from Artemis’s lap and set her on her feet. “Show Temmie how well you can walk now.”
Holding her grandmother’s hand, Angie walked once around the room. She limped because her right leg was less steady than her left, but she held her head high and grinned at Artemis.
“By the gods, Angie. You are doing great,” Artemis exclaimed.
“Which gods are those?” Lucy gave her a disapproving look. “The gods who hurt children to punish their mothers?”
Angie held out her arms for Artemis to pick her. “No, Mommy. The lady says you are very wrong.”
Artemis gathered the child into her lap. “A lady speaks to you, sweetie?”
Angie nodded. “She told me I will get well and that you still love us.”
“I do, little one.” Artemis hugged her tight. “I do. I do.”
Angie started poking her fingers into the pockets of Artemis’s vest. She found a package wrapped in pink paper. Artemis told her to open it. Inside was an angel pin she had bought for Angie in Rome. She put the pin on Angie’s dress.
“Is it the lady I hear?” Angie asked.
Artemis smiled. “It could be. It’s an angel.”
At her daughter’s insistence Lucy got up and walked over for a closer look.
“It’s cute. Tell Temmie thank you.” She bent low to retrieve Angie. Artemis intercepted her hand and held it. Their eyes connected, and for a moment they saw the other’s pain. “It’s all right, Lucy. She can stay with me for a while.”
Lucy stood up and went back to her chair. Claire kept a conversation going, bringing up a new topic whenever things fell quiet. She asked Artemis if she wanted any refreshments, but the offer was declined. It was getting late and Angie’s bedtime was approaching. After a final round of small talk, she handed Angie to Lucy and made to leave.
At the door, she turned back to Lucy and said, “The gods don’t punish mothers, Lucy. Children just get sick sometimes. I wish you could stop punishing us.”