The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  Inside his tomb, he’d listened to the world go on around him. Families moved in and out of the house. He heard sounds of construction, foundations of the house shaking. These times, he tried to will the wall to be taken down or the floor overhead to be torn up. But it never happened—until now.

  “What year is it?” Adair asked.

  “You’re not going to believe it.” Jude grinned insanely, like a Cheshire cat. “It’s 2010, my man. Everything has changed. Everything. The world is an entirely different place now; it’s going to blow your mind.” The Cheshire cat’s grin slipped into something more serious. “And you need me to show you what’s up, because—believe me—you’re not going to know how to do anything. Finances? No one carries money anymore. We use these.” Jude fished in his pocket and pulled out a small rectangle of an unidentifiable hard substance, shiny and colorful. “Credit cards. A portable, personal system of letters of credit. Allows you to buy things anywhere in the world, immediately, no sending letters through banks and lawyers.” He handed it to Adair, who examined it closely. It felt strange to the touch, and insubstantial.

  “And you can go anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. You fly there in an airplane as big as a trading ship.”

  “How can anything as big as a two-masted sailing ship fly?” Adair scoffed, sure that Jude was making fun of him, and the crazy Dutchman had to know that was dangerous entertainment, to be sure.

  “With big enough wings, anything can fly. But that’s not the most astounding thing.” Jude jumped up and walked over to an object on his table that Adair had mistaken for a pane of glass propped against an unusual easel. “Everything that was done before with paper and sent by courier or pigeon is now sent through the air, almost instantly, as if by magic. It’s called a computer.” He gestured grandly at the rather plain sheet of black glass framed with dull silver metal. Adair looked at it skeptically.

  “Magic? So everything nowadays is done with magic?” Adair asked. Had magic become commonplace?

  “No, no—it seems like magic because it’s so easy. But it’s all grounded in the physical world, I assure you. Sent around on waves of energy, directed by code.” Jude waved his hands over the computer like a magician, as though he would conjure a dove out of thin air.

  Adair was unimpressed. “It sounds very much like alchemy: using knowledge to control the forces contained within common elements.” From what Jude had said, it seemed the same as knowing the right spells, the right way to reduce a thing to its most elemental state, how much energy to channel. It was the same magic, packaged differently for men who would not accept the existence of things that could not be quantified and captured in algorithms. But what was an algorithm but a recipe, a formula dictating the way to combine certain elements to get a particular outcome? Science was often indistinguishable from magic to the simpleminded. Did it matter what you called it? In the end, in its most basic state, it all came down to energy.

  Jude shook his head, dismissing Adair’s comparison of computers to alchemy with a brush of a hand. “Don’t try to fit the new world into your old way of thinking. It won’t work. You’ll be better off if you just accept the new for what it is and say good-bye to the past.”

  “Then use your magic to bring Lanore to me,” Adair demanded. “Now.”

  Jude settled back in his chair, casting a conciliatory look at Adair. “We will, we’ll get to her. But . . . there are more pressing things that need to be settled first.”

  “Nothing is more important than finding her.”

  “In good time. Look, I don’t want to rush you into dealing with this, but it must’ve crossed your mind. . . . Have you given much thought to your holdings? Everything you had at the time you . . . you were . . .”

  “Imprisoned?” Adair finished the sentence for him. He was growing increasingly impatient with Jude, irritated by his hesitancy to take orders and by his smugness.

  “Yes . . . we can look into the, uh, specifics once you’ve had time to recuperate, but I have to think that you lost everything.” After the rush of words came out, Jude paused, blinking.

  Everything lost . . . Adair recalled that he’d had quite a lot to his name: the old, large estate in Romania and another in the Black Forest. A house in London. Fortunes held in accounts in venerable old banks across Europe. He’d buried chests with treasure and left vital instruments with a trusted individual, one of his creations, for safekeeping. In all likelihood, those chests had been long discovered, and who knew what had happened to the trusted friend? Could it be true that his fortune was gone—that he was penniless and homeless?

  “I’m sure, after all this time, the properties and bank accounts were forfeited,” Jude explained as gently as he could. “Write down the locations, as best you can remember, and we’ll investigate, but brace yourself for the inevitability that . . .”

  That it would be gone, of course. Anger flooded through Adair again: that treacherous woman had stolen everything from him. . . . Of course, the others, realizing he was gone, might’ve been emboldened to try to find his fortune and claim it for their own as well. That might be why Jude thought it would be a waste of time to search for Adair’s assets; perhaps he’d already tried to locate them and failed. Jude, as wily and greedy as a half-starved fox . . .

  And then it occurred to him that the contents of the house had been lost, too, and among the contents were his books of recipes and spells. Panic stabbed his gut and heart, tightened his throat. Land and money he could lose and recover, in time, but if he lost the source of his power—the two books of spells—then he was helpless.

  As he grasped the truth of his situation, Adair felt as though he were being pulled down to the ocean floor by an anchor tied to his waist. The collection of knowledge he’d amassed from the best practitioners of the dark arts, painstakingly gathered over lifetimes, lost . . . to say nothing of the blood he’d spilled to acquire such knowledge and power, all for naught. He had once been the most powerful man on earth, with abilities comparable to those of a god; and now—unless he could recall those spells from memory—he had to begin his quest all over again.

  Then another thought occurred to him, one that made him sick to his stomach. Perhaps Lanny had figured out the books’ value and kept them for herself. Perhaps that was how she was able to cast a spell on the wretched wall that had held him. If so, she might be a formidable opponent. He must not underestimate her.

  “This is much worse than I thought,” Adair said at last, struggling not to rail against this latest development, to howl at the cruelty of fate, to smash everything in his reach out of sheer black frustration and helplessness.

  Jude put a hand on Adair’s shoulder, the first sympathetic touch Adair had felt in a great long time. “I’m afraid so.”

  Adair let despair pass through him like a savage but swift illness; better to husband that rage, remember the galling impotence he felt, and save his anger for the day when he was face-to-face with Lanore again. This rage would fuel him on the difficult road that lay ahead—more difficult than he’d imagined, if what Jude said was accurate.

  Jude patted Adair’s shoulder again, more stiffly this time, and Adair couldn’t tell if his awkwardness was due to nerves or insincerity. “Two hundred years alone . . . My God, it must have been hell. What was it like?”

  To be shut up in a space no larger than a child’s closet? How do you think it was? Adair wanted to shout at him, remembering the horror of being buried alive. Nothing he’d experienced had prepared him for that ordeal. After a long stretch of deprivation, the world he knew had faded away, the world of sun and plants and rich brown earth replaced by an endless black horizon. Sometimes in the blackness he knew where he was: trapped in a dank space deep in the ground, with only spiders for company. Other times, however, he felt transported to another place, a complete and utter void where he sometimes heard snatches of conversations in voices he recognized but could not place. And in those moments he was seized with indescribable feelings tha
t he knew he’d felt before. It was far more frightening for him than he had thought possible, a man born with ice in his veins, though he’d sooner be tortured by a league of inquisitors than admit it. Especially to Jude. Adair looked away and said nothing as he moved to sit on the couch, letting his silence speak volumes.

  “Your ordeal is over now, and somehow you survived,” Jude said, bringing the matter to a close. “I don’t know how in hell you did it, but you did, and that’s saying a lot. A lesser man would’ve lost his mind.”

  Madness had been closer than Adair wanted to admit. There had been tricks he’d used to keep occupied: mentally, he traveled through his castle in Romania, pacing off the rooms, recalling his favorite appointments—the Flemish tapestry in the front hall, the heavy Bavarian chest used to hold the silver plate—and the views from certain windows. When he tired of that, he tried to recall the names and particulars of all his sexual conquests—the ones whose names he’d known—and then, exhausting that list, the names of all his horses. He picked through the rows of minerals and metals, the botanicals and organic matters stored in jars and bottles on the shelves of his laboratory, naming each in turn, forward and backward, the use and application of each. But eventually he ran out of diversions; he could think of only so many memory games, and not enough to last two hundred years.

  And when his mind was unoccupied—when the wellspring of his fury subsided and he gave in to exhaustion—he shivered to recall what came after that: the terrible visions that came out of the darkness to plague him, nightmares that needled him like aggrieved spirits . . .

  Meanwhile, Jude was patting his shoulder, as he might do to cheer an old man. “I know it might seem impossible right now, but you’ll get back on top. It’ll just take time.”

  Is that what he had come to, Adair wondered, a man pitied by Jude? He rose from the chair, feeling strength rise in him at the same time. “Yes, I will gain back what I’ve lost, and it will happen more swiftly than you can imagine. In this, I have no doubt. And then we’ll turn our attention to Lanore, and find her, and visit upon her the punishment she deserves.”

  THREE

  LONDON

  Adair freed. The day had come, as I’d always feared. I’d often thought about what I would do the day Adair escaped from the prison in which I’d entrapped him. Now that day was here, and I still didn’t know what to do. Because nothing could be done: there was no way to stop the unstoppable.

  I didn’t realize I’d bolted from the museum until Luke caught up to me halfway down the block. I must have sprinted down the stairs, through the Chinese hall, and shoved my way through the crowds at the entrance on Cromwell. He took hold of my shoulders and spun me around to face him.

  “What are you doing? You can’t just go running off helter-skelter. What is it? Is he close by?” Luke’s emergency-room training kicked in automatically. He looked into my pupils as he might those of a deranged person, searching for signs of trauma—not unlike the night we met, when I’d been brought in by the police.

  “No, not real close. But I haven’t felt him since . . . for so long. It scared me.” I pressed a hand to my sternum in an effort to tamp down my wildly beating heart. “I’ll be okay. Sorry for running out like that.”

  Luke held me tight, my face tucked against his chest, and I felt his heart pounding from having run after me. I hoped he remembered the stories I’d told him, the atrocities Adair was capable of; if so, Luke would be as frightened as I was. The very devil had broken out of hell, a devil who could be neither appeased nor thwarted and would soon be on our trail. A thought flicked through my mind: had I put Luke in grave danger? Without a doubt, Adair would stop at nothing to get revenge.

  Luke ran his hand over my hair, a favorite gesture of his, as he tried to calm us both. “If you’re sure that’s what’s going on, what do you suggest we do?”

  I didn’t know, but he was looking to me for an answer. “We have to run, Luke,” was the best I could tell him. “We have to go somewhere he won’t think to look for me.”

  We decided to check out of the fancy hotel near the museum. Having his presence in my head once again, I couldn’t help but feel he was nearby, and this made me nervous about staying put. Once we were at the hotel, however, Luke dogged my heels, trying to change my mind as I flung clothing into suitcases we’d unpacked only a few hours earlier. “Lanny, be logical,” he implored. “We don’t know that there’s any reason to panic. Please, be reasonable.” Logical, reasonable, no reason to panic—now that the initial fright had worn off, I could see that Luke was reverting to his usual way of dealing with things. He was much more comfortable assessing everything methodically and dispassionately—choosing a beer at a pub could take half an hour—and became immediately suspicious whenever I became emotional. It had become a growing cause for friction between us.

  Luke tried to pry a tank top from my hand as I stood over a suitcase. “I can understand why you’re frightened. You feel his presence again,” he continued. “But it just started again, right? Wouldn’t that suggest that he has just escaped? If that’s the case, he’s on the other side of an ocean. And we don’t know that he knows anything about you or how to find you. Maybe nothing’s changed. You mustn’t panic.”

  Except that everything had changed. And panic—justified panic—was exactly what I was feeling. Luke had never felt the air crackle with the electricity of Adair’s presence. He’d never felt the chill from one of Adair’s looks of displeasure, never had his marrow freeze in the bone in anticipation of one of Adair’s soul-crushing punishments. Adair could swallow you up, pull you to him like a toy on a string, and once you were in his grasp, it was nearly impossible to escape. The force of his will was beyond charismatic: it was otherworldly. In two hundred years I’d met princes and generals, rebel leaders and movie stars, but Adair was the only man I’d ever met with a presence this fearsome.

  Frustrated that I wasn’t agreeing with him, Luke gripped my shoulders as he looked me in the eye. “He can’t possibly know where you are if he doesn’t know who you are. Think about it: even if he’s been free for days, it would take him a long time to track you down. You have a new name, a new identity. It’s a big world, and he hasn’t lived in it for a couple hundred years. He has more than a little catching up to do, wouldn’t you say?” There was an edge of irritation in his voice. “And logically”—there was that word again—“the thing you’re feeling could be anything, right? I mean, it’s been two hundred years; what are the odds that it’s Adair? You could . . . have a migraine.”

  I pulled free and gave him a sharp look. “This isn’t a headache. I know. Maybe I can’t tell where he is, how far away or close, but I know what this feeling means. It’s him.” I might’ve been with Adair only a few years, but I’d felt this singular, intrusive presence the entire time, right until the day Jonathan and I walled him up. It was an electric current that cut through my mind like a wire, with no way to switch it off. There was no sensation like it.

  “Can he use it to find you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said quietly. The notion was terrifying—that this crackling in my head might allow him to follow it like a trail of bread crumbs—but I didn’t think it was possible. After all, I’d felt Jonathan’s presence the entire time we’d been apart but hadn’t been able to tell whether he was in the next room or halfway around the world. Of course, Adair was much more powerful and undoubtedly knew how to read the nuances of the connection, knew what it meant when it warbled or stuttered, or when it was strong enough to block out any other thoughts. I had meant to ask Adair about it as I’d meant to ask him about many things, but was afraid of the answers and foolishly hoped that if I ignored my condition, it might go away. Once Adair was behind the wall, I waited to see if his spell would lose its potency and if my mortality would be returned to me, but I knew in my heart that was wishful thinking.

  And now, standing here with Luke in a stalemate, I wondered again if I’d made a mistake. It had been selfish of me
to take up with him—reckless, even—but I had been in a terrible frame of mind. I had lost the man who had been with me, in one way or another, for my whole life, and Luke—logical, steady—seemed like the perfect replacement. Unlike Jonathan, unlike the type of man to whom I was usually drawn, I knew I could depend on Luke. Now, with my head clearer, it was hard to imagine our relationship would last for more than just those practical considerations.

  And, too, I was confronted by the flip side of Luke’s virtues. Where I’d once seen him as steady and practical, he now seemed inflexible. By comparison, I was made to seem impetuous, to be the child to his parent. He didn’t mean to bully me, but I had started to resent his corrections and coercions more and more. This friction seemed to be another sign that we were not meant to be together.

  Also, I knew in my heart that being with Luke—being with any mortal, for that matter—was doomed to end badly for me. Even though I had promised Luke I would remain with him until the end—part of the bargain we’d struck when he helped me escape—I’d never found it easy watching the people in my life die. And—another sign that I’d acted recklessly in taking up with Luke—I’d promised myself I’d never seduce someone with children, and here I’d done it, forcing Luke to choose between me and his daughters. Of course, Luke had had equal part in every decision we made along the way, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d preyed on him in a vulnerable moment. I’d been wrong to pull Luke into my life, and now I was being confronted by my mistake.

  “You think I’m overreacting,” I said to him, throwing the last of my things into my suitcase. “But I assure you, I’m not.” I looked at him with grim seriousness.

  Luke took a deep breath before speaking. “I think it’s important to remain calm until we know what we’re facing.”