Simon Says (Order of the Black Swan, D.I.T. Book 1)

by Victoria Danann

  The non-existent phone service.

  He’d walked into another world, so similar to his own that the differences were practically subtle. His first reaction was a moment of panic. His second reaction, which was processed with lightning speed in the ultimate computer of his brain, was that Sorcha may have survived. He might dare to think that she probably survived. And, if so, where would she have gone?

  The answer was conclusive and immediate. Edinburgh.

  “Now let’s talk about how much it’s worth to you to have a sofa to sleep on tonight,” Angus said.

  “Da. Will you quit? The human is stayin’ free of charge.” Turning to Simon, she said, “With the ferries, it’ll take over eight hours. So I’d like to start by seven.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “You know how to drive?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. You can help then.”

  Simon helped with dishes. Angus went to bed soon after dinner, but Colleen stayed up a while and talked about the ring, all the stories people told about it and how none of them ever seemed to quite ring true. They both laughed at her pun.

  She said goodnight to the dogs and retired.

  The drive to Edinburgh was a revelation. So much was familiar and unchanged, but there were anomalies, like the cattle-sized sheep, that were a constant reminder he was no longer in his world. He had no idea where to begin looking for Sorcha, but thought that since the university had been her home, he might find her there.

  He paid for petrol twice and lunch once. Said it was the least he could do. And asked Colleen to drop him at the university.

  “I work at The Grooved Horn if you ever want to look me up,” she said.

  He thanked her and waved goodbye before turning to stare at the campus grounds, wondering where to start. He finally decided on the administration building.

  “Who teaches myths?” he asked.

  “Well,” the woman said, “that would either be Literature or Classical Studies.”

  “Classical Studies. Where would I find that?”

  She gave him a map and directions to the office of the head of the department, which he found without issue. But no one was there. The door was closed and locked. A sign posted next to the door gave hours. According to the sign they should be open.

  He stopped someone. “Excuse me. Isn’t this office supposed to be open?”

  “No’ today,” he said, pointing to the sign. “Closed on Monday.”

  “But today’s Tuesday.”

  “No. Today’s Monday,” the fellow said.

  “Thank you.”

  Simon leaned against the wall. He and Rosie began the day before, which was Monday. He was sure of it. He’d spent the night, which meant today had to be Tuesday if sanity served him.

  Looking around he could see that the halls were clearing out. Classes were over. Staff was going home.

  He decided to get a hotel room and come back the next morning, but his curiosity about Black Swan Headquarters was compelling him to go there and check it out first.

  It was an easy fifteen minute walk and, since he’d been in a car all day, the exercise was welcome. What he found there was not.

  The Black Swan building belonged to Lloyds Banking Group. He didn’t know why that bothered him. It wasn’t his world and it began to dawn on him how hard it would have been for Sorcha if the exact same thing had happened to her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As suspected, Rosie and Deliverance didn’t need to prepare the device to admit them. Their qualifications, as elementals, were like blanket passes to anywhere, without a need for special equipment, credentials, or invitation. No preparation. No fanfare. They simply stepped through.

  “After you,” Deliverance said.

  Rosie had the gifts that come with being half witch, half demon, but she was more than that because her raw talent had been channeled and controlled, honed and expanded. She’d had the benefit of people who could help her practice skills such as the one she needed right then. Tracking.

  She let her sight go slightly out of focus to see if she could pick up a trace of the energy Simon had left behind. To Rosie it was as clear as a sparkling stream of pixie dust. They followed it to the farmhouse.

  “Oh, aye. He was here,” Angus said. “You must be the friends he was hopin’ to find. Left with my Colleen just an hour ago.”

  “Where did they go?” Rosie asked.

  “Edinburgh.” He eyed Deliverance. “Lose your shirt?”

  Deliverance looked down and grinned. “Yes,” was all he said.

  “Thank you,” Rosie told Angus.

  As they walked away, she said, “I can handle it from here if you like. But if you want to come along, you need to grab a shirt on the way to Edinburgh.”

  “I’ve cleared my calendar for a day with my granddaughter. I’ll step out of the passes at Slaters and borrow a shirt.”

  “No. You won’t ‘borrow’ a shirt.” She used air quotes. “You can afford to buy a shirt, Grand.”

  “Oh, alright.”

  It was nice enough weather for Rosie and Deliverance to be having coffee at the Roxbury sidewalk café when they saw Simon turn the corner. He wasn’t looking their way. Instead he was focused on the building that was Black Swan Headquarters in his world. What he was looking at in his reality of the moment was not Black Swan though. It was Lloyds Banking Group.

  “There he is,” Rosie said.

  “I’ll be damned. You were right.”

  “Of course I was right. Home would be the first place a normal person would go. No need to tax the tracking skills. Common sense rules.”

  “Show off.”

  She laughed. “Let’s go get him.”

  Simon felt a hand on his shoulder and heard a familiar voice. “Gotcha.”

  “I’d be lying if I said I’m not relieved to see you. How’d you find me?”

  “Angus said you were on the way to Edinburgh,” Rosie said.

  “She said you’d go here first thing,” Deliverance added. “Looks like she has your number.”

  Simon smiled at Rosie. “Grateful.”

  “I should chew your ass,” she said.

  Simon’s eyebrows almost hit his hairline. He was not accustomed to being addressed in that way. “Pardon?”

  “Your ass was supposed to be sitting in grass when I got back. Remember?”

  He took in a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “What happened with that?”

  He wondered if he looked as sheepish as he felt. “Curiosity?”

  “Did what?”

  He could have reprimanded her for insubordination, but decided to give her the play of chastising him a little. She was owed that. “Killed the cat.”

  “That’s right. You’ve been a bad, bad boy.”

  “What’s done is done.”

  “Uh-huh. And what’s your plan?”

  “My plan is to ask you how we’re going to find out what happened to Sorcha.”

  “So I’m your plan.”

  “Yes. You are.” He paused. “Well, and I was going to get a room for the night. I need money.”

  Rosie turned to Deliverance, who said, “I thought you didn’t approve of shoplifting.”

  “Stealing money from banks isn’t shoplifting. It’s bank robbery,” she said.

  “Okaaaaaaaay,” Deliverance replied. “Be right back.”

  “Don’t take much,” she added, but he was already gone.

  “He’s not really going to rob a bank, is he?” Simon asked.

  Rosie cocked her head. “Did you think I was going to manifest money from thin air?”

  “Well, no. I guess I thought that…”

  “What? That I maintain bank accounts in every dimension?”

  Simon pursed his lips. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  She laughed. “You didn’t really think that. Don’t worry. The Bank of Scotland can afford to put you up for the night.”

  “That’s not really the point.”

/>   “Beggars can’t be choosers, Director. If you choose to step into another dimension and become a beggar, then you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”

  “I grasp the logic of that.”

  “Excellent. Bottom line, you can take the moral high road another day. Or sleep on a park bench.”

  “Point taken. Next topic. Finding Sorcha.”

  “Is there a reason why you came straight to Edinburgh? The last place you saw her was Orkney. Do you have some reason to think she’s here?”

  “She worked here. Or in the Edinburgh where she, I, we, live. You know what I mean.” Rosie nodded. “At the university. I thought she might seek out what’s familiar.”

  “Good guess. That’s what I thought about you, too, and here you are.”

  “Here I am. Do you think you can track her?”

  “No. I’d have to have something that belonged…”

  Simon was pulling his wallet out of his pocket before she could finish the sentence.

  “She didn’t have anything with her but the clothes she was wearing,” he said. “Everything else was left behind. I kept all of it, but this is what I have with me.” He put Sorcha’s driver’s license in Rosie’s hand.

  “Wow,” Rosie said, looking at the ID. “If she looks this good on a driver’s license, she must’ve been drop dead cute.”

  Simon smiled. “She was. I also have this. I didn’t know her long enough to know for sure that this was her handwriting. Just a guess. Maybe she wrote it. I don’t know.”

  Simon handed over a small piece of paper, high cloth content vellum, tattered around the edges, the ink faded away to nothing in places. It was a short poem.

  Whispers that haunt like a mystery

  Romancing the treasures of history.

  Pan’s flute calls from mist or abyss

  And lingers like the taste of a lover’s kiss.

  Rosie read it quickly. “Pretty. What does it mean?”

  Simon shook his head. “I never got the chance to ask. The passion of a scholar’s curiosity I think. The point is that it meant something to her or she wouldn’t have kept it.” Rosie was hoping the poem didn’t lead them to an ex-lover of Sorcha’s, but of course she didn’t say so. “Will these work?”

  “Think so. Here goes.”

  “Wait!” Simon almost shouted.

  “What?” Rosie asked. Simon looked perplexed. And uncertain. “What?” she repeated.

  “I just… I don’t know.” He looked away.

  Rosie’s tone softened. “You’re scared about what we might find.”

  He nodded slightly. “Perhaps.”

  “Understandable. You want to get a hotel room? Take a night to get prepared?”

  Simon’s spine straightened almost immediately and his expression turned resolute. “Of course not. That would be…”

  “Human?”

  “I was about to say ‘silly’.”

  “Your call. We won’t think less of you either way.”

  “I’ve waited a long time. I’m ready.” He looked down at his watch. It was seven.

  “I have an idea,” Rosie said, glancing at Deliverance, who’d been shockingly silent during the entire exchange with Simon. “Why don’t you take our table and grab some dinner while we go have a preliminary look?”

  “A scouting mission?”

  “Sure,” she nodded agreeably. “We’ll come back here and report even if we don’t find anything. Within an hour. How’s that?”

  His stomach rumbled as if on cue. “Well, I don’t see why not. No longer than an hour though.”

  “Good plan. See you soon.”

  Holding the license and the poem in her hand, Rosie closed her eyes. Her mother had taught her some of the tricks of psychic tracking. Rosie had taken those techniques and added the talents her special pedigree had bestowed. The result was that she was Black Swan’s best tracker. She would never have said that to Simon because she didn’t see herself spending her days as a bloodhound.

  Rosie and Deliverance walked inside the eatery and found the hallway to the restrooms. There was no point in causing an unnecessary ruckus by disappearing from a sidewalk.

  “You good?” she asked her grandpop.

  He wiggled his head on his shoulders. “Hmmm. Starting to feel a little peckish. But I’m into this now. Want to know how this ends.”

  “Sure?”

  “Carry on.”

  “Follow me.”

  When Rosie stepped into the passes, she directed the web that connected all things to configure itself so the path to Sorcha would be, more or less, unmistakable in a follow-the-yellow-brick-road kind of way.

  “Nice trick,” Deliverance said.

  She did a little curtsy. “I try.”

  Within the blink of an eye the two of them were moving at a speed so fast it would appear to the human eye as a blur too brief to register on the conscious mind.

  “What is this?” Deliverance said, when they stepped out and looked around.

  Rosie quickly assessed the visual cues. “I think we’re in the psychiatric wing of a hospital.”

  “The looney bin?”

  She ignored him and pushed through the swinging door next to them. A young woman in a hospital gown was looking out of a barred window.

  “Are you Sorcha?” Rosie asked.

  The woman looked back over her shoulder and said, “Leave me alone,” before turning back to the window.

  “It’s not her,” Rosie said.

  “How do you know?” Deliverance asked.

  “Look at her. She’s no more than thirty. Simon said she was six years older. That means she’d be…”

  “Simon?” The woman asked. When Rosie and Deliverance redirected their attention, they saw that she’d turned toward them. “Is he here? Where is he?”

  Rosie looked at Deliverance. “It’s a slow mo dimension. She thinks this just happened.”

  Deliverance looked back at Sorcha and nodded.

  The dimensions at the lower end of the spectrum vibrate so slowly that they experience time entirely differently.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Do no’ know. A year?”

  “You want to go home?”

  “Home?”

  “Home to the world as you knew it before you, um, came here?”

  “Who are you?” Sorcha asked.

  “People who can make things right. Sort of.”

  “How are you goin’ to do that?”

  “Put you back in the world you belong in. Reunite you with Simon. See if maybe the two of you had a future.”

  Sorcha cocked her head. “A future?” She looked as if the concept was unimaginable.

  “Do you have some clothes? I mean some, you know, other clothes?” Rosie asked.

  Looking down at the cotton gown she wore, Sorcha said, “Just this.”

  “No problem. I’ll get some stuff and be right back.” To Deliverance, Rosie said, “You’re coming with me. I can’t trust you when you’re ‘peckish’.”

  Deliverance gave Sorcha a smile that made her temporarily forget her name. Then the two of them were gone.

  “Oh gods,” she said, “’tis true. I’m daft and seein’ things that are no’ there.” She took a step back toward the chair that occupied the room’s corner and sat down on the bright orange vinyl a little too hard as a tear rolled down her cheek.

  Simon was just finishing gin-cured Loch Duart salmon with Katy Rodger’s crème fraiche and horseradish when Rosie and Deliverance sat down at his table.

  “Good news,” Rosie said. “She’s alive.”

  Simon let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding for twenty years. He was so relieved he could cry, but he was much more interested in hearing about Sorcha. “She’s alright?”

  “Well…” Rosie glanced at Deliverance. “Mostly.”

  Simon’s brows came together. “Elora Rose, do not play with my feelings. Tell me what I came here to learn and be quick about it.”
>
  “Okay. Prepare yourself. The bad news is that she’s in the psychiatric ward at the hospital because they must have gotten the idea that she’s not experiencing the same reality. Which, of course, is true, but made her look crazy anyhow. The good news is that she thinks she’s only been there a year.”

  “A year?” Simon turned that phrase over in his mind as he spoke it, wondering if the experience had compromised Sorcha’s mind.

  “Yes. This dimension moves slower. A lot slower. She thinks she’s only been here a year because it’s only been a year in this world.”

  “How do you know that for a fact?” Simon demanded.

  “Well, for one thing, she looks thirty. No more. She hasn’t aged. I don’t know whether to call that good news or bad news. You’ll have to make the call on that one.”

  Simon was shaking his head like he was having a hard time processing. “She’s spent the last twenty years in a psychiatric facility, but thinks it’s only been a year?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s young?”

  “Well, young is relative…”

  “Thirty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So she looks the same?”

  “I suppose.”

  Simon looked at Rosie. “I don’t.”

  “No, but you’re… Crap. Are you really gonna make me talk about you being a handsome man?”

  Simon sighed deeply. “How should I handle this?”

  Rosie figured she wouldn’t be asked that question by Director Tvelgar more than once in a lifetime. So she decided to give it some thought and answer carefully.

  “She doesn’t have any clothes. I’m going to gather up some things.”

  “No shoplifting,” Deliverance interjected.

  “Then give me some of those bank notes,” she said.

  “I thought that taking what you want from the Bank of Scotland is still shoplifting.”

  “It’s an emergency!” Rosie said.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” Deliverance replied. “It’s called situation ethics. And it means you should examine your own positions before you start lecturing your grandfather.”

  Rosie pursed her lips and tapped her toe for a minute. “Yeah. You’re right.”

  “Say what?” Deliverance said.

  “You heard me. I said you’re right. Give me money.” Deliverance pulled bills from his pocket and handed them over. “Why don’t you go get a suite at the Balmoral? We’ll break Sorcha out and meet you there.”