American Quest

by Sienna Skyy

  Isolde’s eyes traveled down the length of him and she saw burns lining his body. Enervata had exacted his wrath before throwing him to the canteshrikes. And how those beasts must have delighted in turning on Rafe, who stood at Enervata’s right hand, who had never fully adopted the canteshrike ways. How they must have despised him.

  As she had despised him.

  But no, her spite did not resemble theirs. Isolde’s hatred for him harbored an impurity: love. An otherwise solid carbon stone made brittle by the diamond at its core. That terrible love for Rafe had defined her for centuries and brought her naught but the greatest anguish.

  “Isolde, my love, dispatch me.”

  Rage flooded her eyes. No, not rage.

  “Rafe, do not ask me that! My hated love, you know I can’t!”

  To think an hour ago she might have been murdered at Enervata’s feet and spared all this! To have escaped! The only abomination worse than her existence now would be to continue without Rafe.

  Sobs wracked her body. She bent her face to his hair and rocked, breathing in his blood and sweat and the appalling odor of burned skin. But beneath all she found a thin, exquisite scent that belonged only to Rafe. A scent she would lose forever.

  How long would Enervata force her to continue?

  She felt his fingers at her ribs. And when she looked, she saw they grasped at the dagger. It seemed he could barely speak now, so torn was he, and yet still denied the freedom of death. Under the spell of immortality, Rafe could perish only at the sting of Enervata’s dagger.

  “No!” she moaned, stroking his hair. “I cannot let you go. Rafe, please don’t ask me so!”

  How he suffered, she knew. Each breath extracting tremendous pain. It seemed not a single bone existed in him that had not been crushed; not a span of skin that had not been burned or torn.

  If only the spell allowed her to use the dagger upon herself. She would have dispatched her misery long ago. This Enervata had foreseen, even before Isolde realized the hell of her immortality, and he had decreed that the dagger could only find purchase in the hands of another.

  “Isolde.”

  His words so faint, she felt them in her heart more brightly even than she heard them.

  “Isolde, my sweet, transport me to a foreign place, where at your hands I might feel safe.”

  Her jaw seized. She threw back her head and shrieked, a roaring hiss that bore no sound but for the rush of poison air that escaped from her lungs.

  She gripped the hilt and tore the dagger up into the air.

  She wanted to cast it away, into the pool, anywhere. That scream she could not vocalize wracked her broken body.

  She plunged the blade into his heart.

  NEW YORK

  Gloria found another book like the one Sileny had brought her, with tales of the Ketox coyotes. She read a parable about an old woman in the desert whose husband died and the only thing left alive to keep her company was her little calico cat.

  As the story unfolded, she befriended a coyote from the Ketox pack. She left food out for him and he sang to her at night. But the old woman in the tale was poor and one day she ran out of food. Instead, the coyote took her calico cat. He carried it out into the desert and ate it.

  When she read this, Gloria felt a strange sickness creeping over her. It burned at her nerves, and in its wake, left her senses numb. She wanted to look away, didn’t want to finish reading the parable. But once begun, she always felt compelled to finish reading a story. She turned to the final passage.

  The old woman wailed with grief. When the Ketox coyote returned, she besought of him contrition. “I have fed and loved you. How could you devour that which I have loved?”

  The coyote only heckled her. “Why do you seek my repentance? It will not restore your pet to you.”

  “Do you know no love for me?” the old woman moaned.

  “I know only the extent of that which one such as myself can know.” And then, belly full, the coyote sang to her, a sweet keening enterprise.

  Gloria snapped the book closed.

  Enough of that!

  She would not waste a single other moment on tales of loneliness or loss. There were so many books here. There was no reason to read anything upsetting. She ran her fingers instead, along the spines of the other books and lost herself in the decadence of the library.

  The ironic aspect of her captivity was that not only did she have plenty of time to catch up on her reading, but she even had time to go back and revisit some of her old favorites. Interestingly enough, Vance’s library was fortified with both.

  And when he returned that evening with another book in hand, Gloria lingered without bothering to retreat to her room.

  He added the new volume to the shelves.

  “I see you’re reading again,” he said. “Well, we must be sure to keep you in fresh supply. Do let Sileny know if there’s any book you want.”

  “It’s hard to think of any that I can’t already find on these shelves.”

  She eyed the spine of Vance’s new book. “Hugo Martin? I’m a fan of his.”

  “Are you?” Vance removed his coat and disappeared to the kitchen.

  She peeked inside the Hugo Martin title and realized it had been released that day. She skimmed the pages and found herself absorbed immediately.

  The scent of sweet onions caramelizing drifted in. Vance reappeared and handed her a glass of wine.

  “You’ve read his other works, then, I take it.”

  Eyes still on the pages, she sipped absently. “Mmm.”

  “This latest one promises to offer a keen focus on group theory.”

  “Oh? He touched on that a little in the last one.” Gloria followed Vance into the kitchen, where he assembled a simple onion tart and put a sear to a marinated pork loin. He’d rolled his sleeves to just below his elbows, and was deftly chopping roasted vegetables for a salad.

  She slid into the pages again, and when she glanced up from them, she caught his bemused gaze. She colored slightly and took another sip of wine. “Anyway, in his last book he’d talked about the influence of things like religion, community, state. Oh, and education, of course.”

  Vance nodded. “In this one he supposedly takes a closer look at the community factor in change theory. With an emphasis on corporate community.”

  “Oh! I’ve studied this extensively. I’m so glad Martin’s taking it on. You know, people are so quick to judge with corporations. They want to think of them as evil empires. But honestly, corporations are just made up of individual people. All the same change theory principles apply. You have to start with the individual and let that individual find matching ideas among the community.”

  Vance regarded her with a sidelong glance. “True. One must instigate the proper motivation, followed by a systematic method of employing the change. Of course this is best managed with the support of other factions, such as state and educational systems.”

  She smiled. “Yes. And corporations can have a positive impact on society. A bigger impact than individuals.”

  His soot-colored eyes drifted. “It’s a powerful thing, to be able to impact society. You challenge me with your observations. I’ve always wanted to test some of the principles of change theory in a controlled environment. I’ve often thought of how it might be done on a smaller scale.”

  Gloria let her imagination dance over the possibilities. With Vance’s resources, he certainly could test out those principles. And the way his mind hungered for exploration made her think of what she imagined Bruce to be like several years from now. Bright and innovative but with sharper, more developed objectives.

  Bruce.

  Suddenly she felt suffocating pain. The image she’d seen of Bruce, what she knew about him moving on to a life without her. She couldn’t bear to think about it.

  She looked up at Vance. He seemed so hungry for her company. It felt easy to lose herself in conversation with him. To explore the electricity of his mind.

  Bu
t a tide of sadness already coursed through her. She set her wine glass on the counter. “Excuse me. I—I think I need to spend the rest of the evening in my room.”

  Vance’s gaze snapped up from the stove. “Did I say something to upset you?”

  Gloria backed away. “It isn’t that.”

  “Then have dinner with me.”

  “Are you going to force me to have dinner with you, in the same way you’ve forced me to stay here as your prisoner?”

  His face showed surprise. “Of course you’re free to join me only if you wish.”

  Gloria’s heart thundered. “This entire situation is wrong, Aaron. It’s just so wrong, and you know it!”

  She left him alone in the kitchen and fled to her room, closing the door behind her.

  OHIO

  Bruce turned toward the backseat. “What do you think, guys? You wanna hit that diner?”

  “Nothing could be finer!” Shannon chortled. “I love a good greasy spoon, especially if they serve biscuits and gravy. That’ll throw an extra wobble on these hips!”

  Forte gave her a wicked grin. “I’ll wobble your hips, baby!”

  “Eek!” Jamie said, flipping her blinker. “You’re freaking me out back there.”

  She pulled the van up to a stop sign. There were no cars behind them and none in traffic. But Jamie did not advance. The blinker tapped out a turn-to-the-right, but her gaze seemed fixed to the left.

  Bruce followed her eyes. Just beyond the intersection stood a restaurant. Not a diner, an Italian joint. And spaced along the facade, four columns ran upward to a hip in the roof.

  Shannon looked around. “Hey, why aren’t we moving? Oh, wow! I think we may have just found our Four Pillars of Humanity Quickstop.”

  Jamie switched the blinker and turned left to the restaurant. They piled out of the van and went inside. It was nearly empty. A middleaged waitress, an Italian woman with a sad smile to her eyes, greeted them and told them to sit anywhere.

  They assembled at a booth and the waitress passed menus around. Her nametag read Bedelia.

  “Something to drink, kids?”

  “Some water, please.” Bruce said.

  “Sure, honey.”

  She nodded, and she even smiled a bit, but there seemed a heaviness about her. A vacuum that gave her the look of an observer who saw life through a two-way mirror. Bruce suddenly wished he could think of something to cheer her up, something that would turn her smile into a true fact instead of a fake fact.

  She turned her back and walked toward the kitchen.

  Shannon cocked her brow. “Whaddaya think? Suppose old Bedelia is trying to concentrate on how to deprive power from depraved Pravus hordes?”

  Bruce watched the waitress disappear into the back, her apron cinched at her waist in a generous bow.

  Mama bear.

  He thought of the night he and Gloria talked to Carlotta, when she’d explained how to get the escarole just right. A lump formed in his throat.

  “Excuse me; I’ll be back in just a sec.”

  He went to the men’s room and then took his time making his way back to the table. He stole a look into the kitchen and into a utility room. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  As he approached the booth, he saw that Bedelia was standing in front of the table with shoulders shaking and a tear on her cheek. He slowed his steps. He’d caught that sad look in her eye when they first walked in and wondered how that might have escalated to full-on tears in the time it took him to go to the bathroom. But then he noticed everyone else at the table was rocking with laughter and that Bedelia’s tear was from laughing as well.

  He slid into the booth next to Jamie.

  Shannon’s hands were waving about her head. “I took the rollers out and looked in the mirror, and I’m like, I don’t know, a Chia Pet or something. So I’m thinking that’s cool. You know. I’ll rinse it out and maybe it’ll calm down. So I do that and it didn’t, and then when I brushed it I noticed all this hair in my hairbrush. It was falling out. Like, a third of my hair. Breaking off where the hairbrush hit it. But the hair that remained was still standing on end, not even curly, but kind scary-jaggedy looking. So now I’ve gone from Chia Pet to looking like a milkweed.”

  Bedelia wiped her eye. “I take it you didn’t go to your interview?”

  Shannon shook her head, eyes wide. “Oh no, I went all right. Figured I had nothing to loose but another fistful of curly locks. They didn’t hire me for that job, though. They didn’t think I was cameraready, go figure! But the station manager took pity on me and hooked me up with his buddy in radio. You don’t need hair to be on radio.”

  Bedelia laughed. “Well, whatever happened to your hair then, honey, it looks like it’s grown back beautifully now.”

  Bedelia’s cheeks glowed with pink circles of cream blush. Two distinct lines ran down from either corner of her mouth, giving her the cheerful look of a marionette. She cast her gaze back toward the kitchen, shoulders still giving the occasional shake. “Your order’s probably up, kids, I’ll be right back.”

  Bruce watched her go and noted how that distant, sad look in her eye had vanished.

  Forte rubbed the back of Shannon’s neck. “You got a good heart.”

  His gaze lingered on hers a moment longer and she blushed. “That waitress just looked like she needed a laugh. When I saw her I thought, the way her brows and her nose came together, it looked like, reminded me of . . .”

  Forte nodded. “I thought so, too. Thought she looked like your mom. Totally different personality, though.”

  “Reminded me of someone I know, too,” Bruce said, thinking of Carlotta.

  You will have beautiful babies.

  His smile slipped. He and Gloria would have those beautiful babies. He’d solve this, fight this, whatever it was he was supposed to do, and bring her home.

  Bedelia returned with their food and lingered awhile, chatting with them as they ate. When Jamie told her where they had come from and where they were going, she brightened.

  “I love going for long drives! My late husband and I used to go on road trips all the time. It’s weird you should mention it, because last year I saw this van all decked out for the Mexican Independence Day celebration. It was painted all red and green and white, and it had this big-toothed, smiling donkey on it that looked so weird it made me laugh. Ever since then I keep having one of those recurring dreams where I’m going for a long drive in that painted van to see my sister Gloria.”

  Bruce caught his breath. He might have been distracted before, looking for clues and scrutinizing the place, but the name riveted his attention.

  Bedelia continued. “But my sister passed away a long time ago. She’s gone, husband’s gone, even my daughter’s gone now. An asthma attack. One day she was there and the next . . .” she blinked. “It never occurs to you that you might outlive your children.”

  The distracted sadness returned to her eyes. She looked up at them again with a steeled resignation. “It’s just me now. But in the dream, Gloria doesn’t even look like my sister. Not the way she looked when she died, or even when she was younger. In the dream she looks entirely different—pretty young Spanish thing.”

  She shrugged with a laugh, apparently self-conscious. “So silly of me. Dreams don’t mean anything to anyone but the dreamer. I’ve just been getting them so often.”

  Jamie eyed Forte and Shannon.

  Bruce was on the edge of his seat. “Those columns out front. Have they always been there?”

  Bedelia shook her head. “They went up right around the time I saw that funny-looking van. I took leave from work when my husband was in the hospital. Then later when I started working again, there they were. I guess the owner thought it’d make the place look more substantial.”

  She turned and regarded the room with a wave of a dishrag. “Hasn’t helped business much, though.”

  Jamie leaned forward. “That dream you were telling us about? What happens in the end? When you get to y
our sister’s?”

  Bedelia shrugged. “You know how it is with dreams. I always wake up before it ends.”

  She wandered off again and the four looked after her as she busied herself in the dining room, wiping down tables that didn’t necessarily need wiping.

  Bruce turned toward Jamie. “Do you think you can talk her into it?”

  Jamie nodded. “It’s worth a shot.”

  They all pitched in for the check and Jamie gathered the money to go pay.

  Bruce overheard Jamie’s voice. “Bedelia, do you believe in fate?”

  Bedelia gave a nervous laugh, and then cautiously said, “I don’t know anything about that, really. But if I did I’d say those dreams would have something to do with mine.”

  Bruce nodded to himself as he wandered outside with Forte and Shannon.

  Shannon linked her arm with Forte. “Weird stuff happening today, but I guess there’s no doubt we’re on the right track.”

  Bruce nodded.

  Hang on, Gloria.

  He took a careful look at the columns out front. There was nothing unusual about them. He half-expected to find the symbols that had appeared on the stump in the forest in Maine. But there was nothing.

  Still, the columns seemed to have an unusual quality to them. They didn’t look like they’d been there a year. It almost seemed as though someone had sanded and painted them the day before.

  Jamie’s smile filled the doorway when she joined them outside. “Seems our new friend Bedelia agrees that she’s long overdue for a road trip. She’ll have her bag packed and waiting for us in the morning.”

  19

  NEW YORK

  ISOLDE PAUSED BY THE ARCHWAY, filled with hatred for Enervata.

  Her loathing for Rafe used to be an effective anesthetic, but that was gone. Gone forever. Replaced by the pain of loss and remorse over what might have been.

  Enervata’s voice drifted through the archway, along with the agonized groan of another. Not Hedon. She stepped inside.

  Isolde did not find them in the main hall. She hadn’t expected as much. She knew to follow the corridor to the west room where a door stood ajar, a door that would not even exist during times when Enervata allowed his new fixation to roam free. It was the door that led to the Hall of Amusements.