They all looked caught between relief and feeling stupid, this being a minor detail they may not have told Jack. Eric put down his chopsticks and said, “Well, we’ve never tested it. I mean, we only went three times, and we were already fine. We only know this because Lorian told us.”
“Do you think it would really heal her all the way?” Jack asked.
“It almost has to,” said Ryan, turning toward them, eyes bright. “I mean, what would be the point of summoning a paralyzed healer?”
Eric observed, “Even if it doesn’t do it, she should be able to heal herself once there, if she can reach a god.”
“Right!” agreed Ryan. He picked his beer for a celebratory drink.
“I have to get to the hospital to tell Anna this,” said Jack, looking like he meant to do it now.
Eric shook his head. “Well, I agree, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I don’t want to give her false hope. We should not be too excited to tell her in case we’re wrong. I think right now we’re all a little too keyed up about it.”
Jack laughed. “Yeah, sure. I hear you. I wouldn’t be able to say it calmly and her parents might ask questions.”
“Exactly.”
Matt said, “And here all this time I’ve been worried about being summoned again, and now I want to do it.” He let out an enormous sigh that mirrored the room’s mood. “Do you guys get nervous when we get into a car now? I mean, what happened to her could happen to any of us.”
“Yeah,” said Eric, having thought the same thing all day, since he’d spent far too much time in one. He had kept thinking to stay off a highway, but even the back roads were at least 35 mph and being hit at that speed was still enough to kill anyone. Driving through neighborhoods meant less traffic, but it could certainly take forever to get anywhere that way, though it was worth it. They were lucky Anna was not dead, as no healing would change that. “I think we need to limit our travel.”
“Imagine being in a plane at thirty-five-thousand feet,” started the techie, “and you get summoned. When you come back, this time there’s no plane.”
“Geez,” said Jack, opening a beer. “I should think through more of this.”
“Yes,” said Eric, taking a beer for himself. “Speaking of summoning, the next time it happens, Anna will return to the hospital room she’s in at the time. Jack, that means you may need to hang around the hospital for a sign of her.”
“Sure, whatever you need. How am I going to know she’s back?”
“Keep your phone on and charged. We all need to make a point of having our phone in a pocket. When we get back, our first action aside from getting out of sight and safe is to call or text Jack.”
“Good plan,” said Ryan, coming back to the table and sitting down. He grabbed a fork and dove into a dumpling.
Eric turned to Jack. “You can be in the hospital lobby, or cafeteria. Just keep changing places so no one sees you hanging around too much for too long, and when you get a message from one of us, you head straight for her room to help her. I would have a change of clothes for her, a hat to hide her hair in, that sort of thing. She might need shoes.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, I still have the key to her place and will head over there, keep a bag ready.” He pursed his lips.
“What?” Eric asked, sensing another problem he would need to solve. Fortunately, he enjoyed being analytical and creating plans, especially when they worked, but there seemed to be an awful lot of issues coming up all the time now.
Jack let out a breath and looked apologetic. “You know, today is a day off, but sometimes I kind of need to be at work.”
“No, forget Starbucks,” said Ryan, shaking his head. “They have other managers. I’m hiring you as my personal assistant at four times your current wages, maybe more.” To Jack’s raised eyebrows, the big guy softened his tone. “I know it’s a good job, but we need you, desperately, and you’re the only one qualified for what we need, you know.”
“Sure.”
Eric saw that Jack wasn’t too happy, but was willing to do it anyway. He also knew the job wasn’t supposed to be forever anyway, as Jack was still trying to figure out what to do with his life, but it was a good gig in the meantime.
“You know,” he said, “we really appreciate everything you’ve already helped with, and this might be the most important thing of your life, just like with us. Many things are happening in the world now that weren’t before, and you’d be on the front lines, so to speak.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, I know. I get it. Sorry if I don’t seem excited. I just hadn’t thought about it before. It’s just a piece of my life I’m giving up, but you guys are losing so much more.”
Ryan added, “Financially, you will not have to worry about anything in return for your help. I’m thinking to get you a credit card for you to use, so you can buy things we need. We seriously need you for so many things.”
Ryan called his attorney, letting Quincy know he needed a discreet way to access his money. He also told him to set up something to pay Jack a salary, a large “signing bonus,” and creating an expense account and credit card for his use. He made a point of all of it being as untraceable as possible.
Eric had been thinking of something else that usually took a while to arrange, so they needed it to start immediately. “I think we’re going to need somewhere to stay long term. We have to assume these quests are indefinite. I’m talking a house.”
Ryan offered, “I’ll pay for somewhere.”
“I want to focus on a home base to set up,” began Eric. “This is a priority. We can use this hotel room for a few days, but we need a long-term location, one we never have to leave, with Jack getting things for us, or delivery service. Jack can live there, too.”
“So we need five bedrooms,” mused Matt.
“We’re thinking too small,” said Ryan. “We need an estate, somewhere up on Route 28 near Sugarloaf Mountain, where all those large farms are. They have a bunch of land. Some have multiple buildings, like a guest house, or an older house before a new one was built. We need a barn where all of you can practice your riding. We need a martial arts training room like what we were setting up at the guest house. We need an archery range no one can see from the road. We can do swordsmanship in an indoor riding ring. We need a place where Matt can do magic, where no one sees it, if it’s really working here. Maybe we need a set of locks we all learn to pick, or a rock-climbing wall so we can get experience with that, too. We need to cross train each other and get private lessons when we can, though doing that with no one knowing it’s us might be an issue.”
Eric’s intense gaze fixated on him. “That was good. You are right. How much are those estates?”
Ryan shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”
“How much?”
The big guy smirked at the insistence. “Two to four million.”
“How do we get your parents to do that without asking questions?”
Ryan lifted a beer bottle wryly. “That is a great question.”
“I think he’s right, though,” added Matt. “That would be ideal. We need good security but not so good that it looks like we’re fugitives or something.”
“Too late for that,” Jack joked. “But seriously, if no one knows about it, you’d be freer. Not looking over your shoulder all the time.”
“Right,” admitted Eric, “and it’s exactly why we need it all done discreetly, which is another problem. If your parents buy an estate up there, people will wonder why. Places like the FBI would know.”
A moment of silence followed that before Matt suggested, “Maybe there’s some sort of shell corporation your attorney can set up and they buy the estate. I don’t know how that works, though.”
The others seemed to agree, but no one said anything for a few minutes.
Ryan suggested, “Maybe in a few minutes, you can show me more sign language.”
Matt agreed and opened his mouth to respond, when a knock on the door stopped further conversatio
n. They exchanged a look.
“Does anyone know we’re here?” Eric whispered.
“Shouldn’t,” said Jack. “Quincy?”
Ryan nodded. “I’ll check.”
“Peephole,” Eric suggested.
Ryan went up to the door and peered through the hole. Then he turned back with a scowl and motioned for Eric to come over. The others followed. “It’s a woman, about forty years old.”
Eric looked and stepped back. “I don’t know her.” Matt and Jack looked, too, but they didn’t either, so he thought a moment and then asked loudly, “Who is it?”
The woman answered, “Eriana of Coreth.”
Chapter 11 – A New Friend
Erin waited in the hall for a sound from beyond the door, her long skirt swaying with her fidgeting. She smoothed her blouse and tried to calm herself. She had good ears and heard furious whispering. She had to play this right or it might quickly go south, and she had a lot riding on the next several minutes. Many years of facing horrific danger had made her serene in the face of just about anything, but she was nervous for the first time in forever. All for a conversation.
But the information it might reveal was so devastatingly important to her that it had literally kept her up at night since the moment she’d seen that pretty girl—Anna was her name—playing with that pendant… that pendant… and talking about her reappearance at Stonehenge after three weeks of being missing with the young men on the other side of this door.
Erin had been following the news before they returned this week, and she knew about the three girls in the car accident, one maimed, one dead, and the other paralyzed. She knew the police had been looking for Anna and now patrolled the hospital where she lay. And she’d certainly heard about Anna then reappearing on the highway and being struck by a car. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Something was terribly wrong for several reasons, mainly because no one on Earth should have been trying to summon the Ellorian Champions a thousand years since the last time they did. All of them would have been long dead by now. But the Ellorians had also never just returned to where they had been before a summoning. They had always gone to their Home Rings from a Quest Ring. This modern world offered a horrible danger that all of them had just realized with Anna’s fate now caught in it.
After the recent events, the private investigator she used had grilled her a little about her persistent interest in the Stonehenge Four. He had helped her collect supposed magic items from around the world for years, making inquiries about a purchase on her behalf. Now he had asked her to explain about the pendant the girl Anna wore. She only said that it might have once been magical. This was true, except that she—and likely she alone—already knew what it was and what it did. Or had done. If she remembered right, the pendant’s power should be spent by now. She couldn’t tell this to her investigator because he would never understand.
Before now, she had only asked him to find addresses and biographical information of the Stonehenge Four, not hack into financial records to figure out where people might be staying. So Erin wove the truth through a story that the girl’s pendant was partly responsible for the four disappearing. It was dangerous to them and she had to warn them, but with reporters and now people after them, she couldn’t find them and needed his help. All of this was true, except that the pendant itself posed no danger. They had already set the effect of returning it to Stonehenge after a thousand years in motion.
He had grudgingly accepted the explanation, wanting to know what she was looking for. Trying to think like an old friend of hers, who was far better at this, she had reasoned that the rich one, Ryan, was likely paying for lodging somewhere but under another name. None of their parents could lend support because if they opened an investigation into Anna or the others, the same financial records Erin wanted to use would track their whereabouts. It had to be someone else.
Her hunch had been correct, but it wasn’t until Ryan’s attorney bailed him out, revealing his identity, that they got another name to check and learned of the hotel room reserved under the lawyer’s name. She had to promise her investigator that she would pay every legal bill if anyone ever found out, arrested him, and destroyed his business. That had only made him more suspicious, but there was a good reason she had spent considerable time with him over the years, earning his trust, even having a long affair with him to bewitch him as much as she could. And it had worked. She could tell he still loved her. She wondered if that would remain true once he found out who she really was.
Now she waited for that hotel room door to open, trying to look unthreatening and pleasant, which on one hand was easy because she was both. But her mind raced, for the reaction to her true name had told her something. She just wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
Then a voice she recognized from the TV interview spoke from beyond the door. “Can you repeat that?”
“Eriana of Coreth, one of the Ellorian Champions.”
After a pause, the same voice asked, “How do we know it’s you? Eriana is in her mid to late twenties, from what we understand.”
That brought her up short and her mind raced. “Honestly, Eric, I do not know how to answer that. I have lived here for twenty years, but by my reckoning, you should not expect me to be alive at all, or I would be a thousand years old.” After a pause, she added, “I would very much like to discuss this with you, and learn what you know of me, Andier, Korrin, and Soliander, and how you came to be substituted for us. It appears clear that this has happened from the news reports, and your friend Anna in the hospital, and–”
“Open the door,” said another voice from inside.
Eriana thought it sounded like the techie, Matt. Andier had long ago taught her to memorize faces, voices, and more to aid in dealing with the considerable intrigue that had sometimes dogged them. She heard some arguing before the door suddenly opened to reveal four young men, three that she recognized. Her eyes moved between and stopped on Matt because of the intense way he was scrutinizing her face. This went on for several seconds of tense silence as she waited, eyes drifting to Eric and Ryan, then lingering on the other man, who expression spoke of attraction to her more than curiosity. Matt finally broke the silence.
“It’s her. She’s older, like you said, maybe twenty years, but it’s her. We found her. We found Eriana!”
She smiled, comforted because they were looking for her, and they seemed excited, not the least bit threatening. She relaxed a little. “It’s more like I found you,” she observed.
Eric turned to Matt. “How can you know that it’s her?”
“Soliander’s spell, remember? I recognize–”
“You’ve seen Soli?” Eriana interrupted, stepping forward. “How is he? Where is he? When did you see him?”
More questions surged in her mind as relief and excitement filled her. It had been twenty years with no sign of them. She stopped looking long ago, convinced they were dead or possibly flung to another planet, like their home, Elloria. With magic no longer working here, had they been looking for her and unable to reach her, like the Earth was a phone giving a perpetually busy signal? And now there was an answer. Or maybe Soliander somehow was here all this time. Had they given up the search for her? She had to know if it was only him or the others, too.
Eric held up one hand to stop her and then gestured for her to enter. “I think you had better come inside.”
She followed them as they moved toward the table where leftover food remained, the unknown guy locking the door. Being in a hotel room with four young men she didn’t know might have given many women pause, but Andier had taught her a thing or two about self-defense long ago, and enough of her healing power had returned in the last month that she knew a quick word would render all of them unconscious. Well, normally it would. In her weakened state, it might only weaken them, but it would be enough to escape.
As Eric gestured to an upholstered chair, the guy she didn’t recognize said, “I’m Jack, by the way. You seem to know everyone el
se.”
“Yes,” Eric began as they sat, “how is that? News reports?”
“Yes,” she admitted, deciding not to admit that her investigator had turned up everything he could find on them. It would cause distrust, and she had to gain their trust first. As if reading her mind, Eric spoke again.
“Well, we’ve exchanged some names, and Matt thinks he recognizes you, but is there anything you can do to prove you are Eriana?” After a moment, he asked a similar question in elvish.
She smiled at that, thinking he was clever and quick. Eric picked up a sharp knife, holding it over his hand. She sensed his intent and replied in elvish, “My healing powers have begun to return, but you needn’t do it to yourself, and don’t do too much.”
He returned to English. “A small demonstration is fine with me, and I can’t let a lady cut herself for my sake.”
He sliced the top of his hand, a line of blood rising but not dripping. It wasn’t deep and would hardly need a band aid, but it was enough for her to get the point across. She placed two fingers on either side of the wound. “Please heal this man, Almighty One.”
A soft light filled the wound, which closed, though it wasn’t apparent until Eric used a white napkin to wipe away the blood, leaving smooth skin. His eyes met hers then.
“I also have this,” Eriana began, reaching into her bag. She pulled out something in a soft jewelry bag, laid it on the table, and unwrapped the item. It was a gold amulet depicting one figure kneeling beside another that was rising from a supine position. From their expressions, she saw they recognized it. She had been wondering if they would and asked, “Do you know what this is?”
“The Amulet of Corethian,” Ryan replied, looking a little confused. “It belongs to Eriana of Coreth.”
So they did recognize it. She wasn’t sure how that could be, given that she’d had it since arriving in New Zealand two decades ago. She had never let it be captured on film. The technology for photos or video didn’t exist on the other planets she had worn it to before that, so if they were journeying to them, they wouldn’t see images of it there unless someone had drawn it. But she had shown it on a hunch. And while it seemed to confirm her identity to them, it only raised more questions for her. How could they know what it looked like?
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