by Amy Lignor
Taking another taste of the pungent brew, Leah expressed a deep sigh of relief.
“I can’t believe you’re so tall. Your caffeine intake should’ve stunted your growth a long time ago,” Gareth spoke, watching her polish off the dregs of one cup, before handing over his own for her enjoyment.
Leah smiled, but guilt took over as she watched him pull the faded photograph from his back pocket. She glanced at the picture of the man Gareth certainly resembled, sitting under the gnarled limbs of a menacing looking tree. A tree that supposedly grows here, she thought to herself.
Throwing the cups into the bin beside them, she reached out her hand. “We’re not going to find out anything by just standing here and arguing over the negative effects of caffeine. We’re gonna have to walk this place,” she said, staring up the ancient path.
Gareth took her hand. “I’m ready.”
“Me too.” Anippe’s words buzzed in her brain: This feels like a gigantic charade. Leah wondered if her sister was right. It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if they were about to walk directly into a trap. That seemed to be the norm when it came to their journeys. But as they moved forward, Leah took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, readying herself for whatever new thing they’d have to face…or fight.
CHAPTER 4
She heard the footsteps racing up behind them. Already feeling as if they were standing in the sightline of a killer taking aim, Leah closed her eyes and took a breath—trying to keep calm.
Maybe it isn’t a killer, she said to herself. After all, we’re tourists. Maybe we’re about to meet up with a pickpocket. “Nope. Worse,” Leah muttered. Staring at the sparkly dressed girl as she ran by, Leah’s shoulders relaxed.
“See? Everything around here is totally old and ugly, right?” Chloe shouted out to her. She slowed a bit when her eyes landed on the man by Leah’s side. “Oh. Well. Not everything.” Sending a sly smile to Gareth, the girl continued on her way.
“Who’s that?” Gareth asked.
“A girl who wants to be in Hawaii gawking at hot surfers.” Leah’s annoyance came through in her words, “It’s frightening that this next generation could care less about history. They don’t want to know about anything that doesn’t involve buttons, smiley faces and things called apps.”
Gareth grinned. “Now, now, they know plenty. Twitter, Facebook, how to hack into secret government documents, how to steal your credit cards, how—”
“By the way,” Leah interrupted, “I officially hate the words: literally, totally, and right. I no longer want either of us to say them.”
He took a step back. “Right is going to be a hard one to toss.”
She shook her head. “Okay, you can keep that one.”
“Literally?”
Ignoring his teasing smile, Leah returned her attention to the path ahead. Trying to shake off the paranoid feeling of eyes burning through her skull, she switched on the familiar research button in her brain and scanned the area. Ancient days were certainly hard, Leah thought to herself as she watched the grade grow steeper with each step. As it was with the acropolis in Athens, this was yet another that’d clearly been created to make boys into men and girls into hunched-over bitter women suffering eternal backaches.
Wrapping his arm around her waist, Gareth pointed at the young bubble-gum chewer. She had stopped to flirt with someone who was so pasty and bore so many piercings in his flesh that he looked like a Roman gladiator who’d lost his fight against a vicious tiger. “Maybe she found her one true love.”
Without skipping a beat, irony spewed forth. “Too bad they didn’t meet in prison. That way they’d have somewhere memorable to celebrate their anniversary instead of having to come back to this dusty, old place.”
Gareth’s laugh was so loud that Leah swore it moved the slabs of ancient marble that hung precariously from columns all around them. “You really are rotten, you know that?” he said.
She shrugged. “You married me.”
“You know,” he began. “I was thinking of our recent union—” Gareth stopped, staring at the large hole in the ground. “Sacrificial pit,” he mumbled.
Leah chuckled. “Nice to know that’s what you think of our recent union.”
He pointed. “I was talking about that.”
Craning her neck, she contemplated the big pit filled with nothing but gray dust, and nodded. “They burned women in there.”
As if coming back from a distant thought, Gareth smiled. “Wow. You must be tired. I don’t remember you ever being wrong about such things.”
She waited for his explanation.
“This is where Demeter’s temple would’ve been. Her place of worship is always found at the bottom of any acropolis.”
“Oh. Right.” Leah nodded. She shook her head, trying to engage her fatigued brain. “For the parade.”
“Exactly.” Gareth tightened his grip as they moved forward. Leah was thankful. She knew that her hero would support her until she could find a way to regain her focus.
It didn’t hurt that his intelligent voice was also soothing. “Every year a parade would be held that led from the top of this site all the way down the acropolis in honor of Demeter. Her secret cults would praise the goddess that day.” He raised his eyebrows. “So…no women would have been thrown in there.”
“Yes, those crafty Demeter cults only sacrificed guys.” Leah offered up a huge laugh as they moved on. “The original girl power.”
Feeling his hand go slack in her own, she looked up to see the handsome face turn grim. “He couldn’t have been here in 2009, Leah,” Gareth stated for the hundredth time. “I was a teenager when they died.”
Leah kept silent, wishing with everything she had that she could find a way to help him.
“But then he just happens to appear in a photograph buried in a journal that we just happened to find inside an old Nazi castle? How?”
All she could do was shake her head. The mysteries that they’d stumbled across so far were more than confusing. “God only knows.”
“And it’s obvious He’s not talking.”
“There’s got to be a clue here somewhere.” She scanned the area as she spoke, watching tourists without a care in the world enjoy their walk. “Let’s go over it again.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “We’ve been over it.”
“Which is why I said again,” she replied.
A smile flitted across his face at her tone. “Yes, ma’am.”
“There you go,” she said, playfully punching him on the shoulder. “Now isn’t it better when you just cooperate with me?”
“Safer,” he mumbled, rubbing his shoulder.
Smiling, knowing that it would take a forklift to bruise the man’s strong body, Leah tried to let the overabundance of caffeine in her system spark her brain. “Okay. Your parents came across a parchment in the 1970’s.”
He rolled his eyes. “You already remember everything, Leah. Why go through this again?”
“Because I don’t remember everything,” she replied quickly, trying to keep the anger she felt at her own failures in check. “At least, not at the moment. It feels like the more we go through, the less I know. And I think we can pretty much agree that I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to all the religious stuff involved.”
Gareth snorted and dropped his chin to his chest.
“What?”
“I’ll never get over the fact that a supposed descendant of Moses isn’t good with all the religious stuff.”
“Apparently it skipped a few generations,” Leah stated, remembering that one unbelievable journey that’d uncovered her supposed lineage. Yet another discovery that she certainly wasn’t buying as truth.
Gareth planted a kiss on her lips, causing her heart to leap without warning. The passion she always felt for him suddenly mixed with the coffee pumping through her veins. She could almost feel the next wave of energy that she needed to continue. “Go on.”
He shook his head in
frustration. “My parents found a parchment called the Apocalypse of Adam which told about the reincarnated lives of Zarathustra.”
“Who was a scientist.”
“Supposedly.” Gareth shrugged. “He was also the creator of the theory that the twelve constellations in the sky were somehow a map that could lead a person directly to the location of Paradise.”
Leah tried to work through his familiar words in order to find anything new. Any explanation as to how the death of Gareth’s parents could have been faked, and why. “Your family followed clues and figured out—”
“—where the entrance to Heaven was located on Earth,” Gareth ended, with a nod. “They spent a lot of time studying religious astrology, and they believed there were twelve orbs that—when brought together—formed a key that would unlock the Gates of Heaven.” He added, “Of course, they didn’t know there was a thirteenth sign. That discovery belongs to you.”
“I’m honored,” Leah deadpanned. “So nice to know that because of my crazy brain we’ve almost been killed a gazillion times.” Her voice lowered, “Sometimes I think this journey of ours isn’t going to stop until one of us is dead.”
Worry shone in his gaze. “Leah. We don’t need to be here.”
Rolling her eyes, she waved her hand in the air. “Don’t listen to my gibberish. I’m just tired. Go on.”
“My parents went to a rally the night they died.” He sighed; the pain of the past was audible in his voice. “I went with them.”
“To meet a guy with a weird name.”
Gareth nodded. “Jiddu Krishnamurti. His belief was the same as theirs, and my parents wanted to tell him what they’d found.”
“So he would help them.”
Gareth looked like he was in another world as he spoke. “Mom believed the theory with her whole heart.”
Leah watched tears glaze his eyes, glimpsing the emotional pain of a young man who had been orphaned far too soon. She bit down on her lower lip, and waited.
Shaking it off, Gareth took a deep breath. “We went to the Research Center in New Mexico to listen to Jiddu’s speech. When it was over they went up to the podium and tried to talk to him, but security shuffled the guy out the back door. They did get to talk to one of his followers, though.”
Leah cut in, “Did they tell this follower anything about why they wanted to see Jiddu?”
“I don’t honestly know,” Gareth replied. His jaw tightened and anger clouded his eyes. “My parents wanted so badly to prove the existence of Heaven. They tried everything…and never found it. Decades later, however, their son ends up buying a gift for the woman he was falling madly in love with that just happened to be the damn stone of freaking Satan. Irony at its finest, right?”
Leah watched his hands turn to fists at his sides. Trying to stop his guilt for something he could not possibly have known about, she smiled. “Madly in love with?”
“Well…I liked you a little.” Gareth grinned, but Leah could see in his face the struggle he was having. She knew he felt a huge burden for bringing the gemstone into their lives.
She continued quickly, “Your sister stayed home that night.”
“Kathryn had the flu.” His voice grew soft as he spoke of the sibling he loved, “Thank God.”
Leah nodded. “It was just the three of you in the car.”
Gareth closed his eyes. “My parents were jabbering away in the front seat, but I could have cared less. I was a kid. Hell, I thought the hot girl in math class was what paradise was all about.”
Leah laughed softly.
Opening his eyes, he gazed down at her. “There were other hot girls in my life before you.” Taking a moment, he tilted his head to the side. “Well…one.”
He went silent. Leah lowered her voice, squeezing his hand as if to remind him that he had love and support close by. “Were you awake when it happened?”
Gareth shook his head slowly. “I woke up in the hospital with a nurse telling me they were gone. Car had crossed over the line. Drunk driver. Nurse said, I was lucky. I was thrown from the window.” He turned his face away. “Only reason I lived and they didn’t, supposedly.”
“And you went to stay with other family members and took care of Kathryn from then on,” Leah reminded him, leaning up to kiss his cheek. “Yet another trait that makes you the most wonderful man I’ve ever met.”
A question arose in her mind, but she hesitated before asking it. “You never actually saw their bodies after the accident, did you?”
“I know what you’re thinking, Leah. But my parents didn’t just run away. They weren’t trying to hide anything like your—” he stopped quickly. “I mean. Wait.” He shook his head, visibly struggling to find a way to undo his insinuation.
Leah’s face grew warm and the bitterness stuck in her throat. “I’m not implying that your parents were disgusting individuals like mine.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Gareth spoke faster, but Leah raised her hand in the air.
“We’re not talking about me.” Taking a deep breath, she put a stop to a conversation she did not wish to have, and took a moment to calm down. “Anippe thinks this may just be a gigantic set-up. Finding the picture, coming here…”
“No one set this up, Leah. We found the photo by accident.”
Wanting to believe him, Leah moved away and began to walk up the hill once again. The sudden quickness of her steps matched those of the warning bells going off in her mind. As far as she was concerned, nothing they’d gone through up until now had been an accident.
CHAPTER 5
As Leah Tallent continued her ascent, he stood watching. Quietly. Unmoving. His hood covered his head and his hands were back in his pockets. His envy of Lowery was palpable. After all, Gareth was allowed to gaze into the unforgettable eyes of the librarian and hear her mesmerizing voice in his ear which, as far as he was concerned, should be gifts granted only to himself.
Trying his best to blend in with the tourists, he glanced at the scenery while pondering why Leah had even fallen for the muscular man. Looks, of course; that was easy to see. However, it seemed to him that a woman of Leah’s intelligence would need far more of an equal in the brains department in order to stay interested.
Apparently, he was wrong. From his position he watched Lowery grab her hand and pull the lady into his arms. He spoke briefly—most likely words of love that failed to bring anything advantageous to their situation—and then kissed her.
He tried not to laugh when an idea suddenly came to him. He would so love to see their faces right now if he opened his mouth and shouted out a greeting. It would be a thrill to see their skin turn white with shock when they realized that the enemy was only a few steps behind.
“Hi!”
He jumped at the sudden interruption to his thoughts. Without missing a beat, he aimed a smile at the young girl who sparkled in the sunshine. “Hello.”
“Are you, like, having a good time?”
He almost burst into laughter at the girl’s blatant attempt at flirting. He took note of how she let her chin fall a bit towards her chest. She then went on to flutter her eyelashes and produce a very poor ‘come hither’ look that so few could master at any age. “It’s been intriguing…thus far.”
“I’m Chloe.” Introducing herself, she let her hand dangle in front of him like some sort of treat to grab on to and savor.
“Pleasure.” Ignoring the hand, he offered her a small, elegant bow in return.
“You look smart.” Blink, blink. “I bet you know all kinds of stuff about this place. Want to be my guide?”
“I believe you already have one.” He jerked his head in the direction of a lanky teen who was dressed just like him. Unfortunately, the poor boy owned an ashen face which caused the small red pimples to stand out even more.
The young girl sighed. “He’s just a new friend.”
“Well, between you and me,” he whispered, taking a step closer, “I think it’s safer if you stay with your new frien
d.”
Exhaling an annoyed sigh, a small pink wad of bubble gum shot from Chloe’s mouth and landed directly on top of the sand filling Demeter’s ancient sacrificial pit.
Doing his best not to snicker, he watched the girl stomp off. Her parting words were issued with a voice so loud, he thought they could most likely be heard by the lost civilization that used to inhabit this place: “I totally hate old guys.”
Regaining his focus, he watched the team of Tallent and Lowery turn a corner and disappear from sight.
CHAPTER 6
As they continued up the next rise, the well-trodden path began to level out underneath their feet. Both sides of the trail were decorated with columns in various stages of deterioration. Podiums could be seen every few feet, and dotting the landscape were large marble boxes and oddly-shaped pillars resembling anvils.
Gareth watched Leah study everything, as if attempting to find any clue that would perhaps spark her brilliant mind to lead them in the right direction.
“Anything here you know about? That your parents might have talked about with you?”
He looked around. “Well, this area was the gymnasium. The highest terrace you see was saved for the neoi.”
Leah laughed. “Ah, yes…the neoi; those strapping eighteen-year-old boys practicing to be all they could be.”
Gareth directed her gaze to the huge empty boxes. “And those are the Roman baths where the best of the best relaxed their aching bones.”
“Bathing right outside in front of everyone who passed on by.” Leah smirked. “Bet there was a lot of lust in the dust here.”
“Well, it was Satan’s shop of sin for a time.” He pointed at a small semi-circle of marble; the intricately carved columns perched on either side were cleanly broken in half. “That’s where the athletes held all their ceremonies.”
“Looks like Sampson visited here and put on a show of his famous strength. Or maybe there was an ancient Olympic event that awarded a golden statue to the one who could topple the marble the fastest.”
