Closet. Clothes and shoes, then stuff on the altar in the corner. He’d need to dust all of that first, and get some newspaper to wrap the breakables in. Was there going to be enough room in his personal storage unit for everything? Probably, he mused; he didn’t have a lot down there.
Taking a deep breath, he set the box in front of the closet and flung open the door.
Next thing he knew, he was on his knees with his head touching the floor, fighting off a wave of weakness and sorrow so great it nearly left him wailing into the carpet. The smell…god, how he’d loved that smell, incense and body wash and the barest hints of sweat, the underlying scent of immortality, something no human would be able to detect. Spices…he remembered the taste of the Elf’s blood, and his mouth, his skin…once, he’d had to run out for a meeting five minutes after they’d had sex, no time to shower, and he’d spent the entire day battling free-floating arousal every time he leaned a certain way and breathed in the heady reminder of that afternoon.
He couldn’t cry. He knew he needed to—there was so much grief pent up inside him that if he didn’t release some of it any minute he was going to shatter into a thousand shards that would lacerate anyone in their path. But he couldn’t. Something in him was still holding on, still waiting.
He remembered this feeling. Fox hadn’t left a body behind either, and there had been nothing for Jason to stare at, nothing to see, to force him to accept the truth. There was nothing but ash and blackened rubble, now as then, and some part of him had held on for years, wishing beyond all hope that it was all a lie, and that Fox…and now Rowan…would show up on his doorstep one night, demanding to know why Jason had given up on him.
But after a century he had finally let go of Fox, and found someone else to love…only to have his heart flung out to sea again, dashed against the rocks and left adrift with no rudder and not even the stars to lead him back.
He lifted his eyes to the row of neatly-hung clothes in their various earth tones. “I can’t do this,” he said softly, the first words he’d spoken all night. He might have been talking about the box, or about living in general, but regardless, he got to his feet and closed the closet door, leaving the box where it was and wandering out of the bedroom.
He was too tired to work out, and in truth he had no fight left. He couldn’t think of anywhere to go, and all of his old escapes—alcohol, sex with random strangers, a few forays into drugs—would be even more painful than what he was feeling now.
There was only one thing left.
The Tempest was right where he’d left her, in her case tucked in a dresser drawer where he didn’t have to look at her. The bow Beck had bought him lay untouched on the coffee table. He took up both with a sigh and returned to the bedroom.
Jason had long ago given up any sort of belief in the afterlife, but perhaps he was simply feeling vulnerable; as he began to play, drawing long mournful notes out of the violin, he closed his eyes and imagined that the sound could travel across paradoxical distances and into death itself, to reach his beloved, wherever he was, and bring him some sort of comfort. In his mind the music painted a landscape of faraway shores, some ancient pristine forest somewhere that safeguarded the eternal spirit of the Elves.
He knew there would be no answer, yet he called. He had nothing left to give his love, nothing to offer but what he always had. He hadn’t been there to hold Rowan as the Elf sighed his last breath. The Elf had died alone. Jason couldn’t save him, and couldn’t bring him back, but if he had one desire in that moment, it would be to reach him, in whatever form lasted beyond the last, and tell him one more time that he was loved, and would always be loved, always.
*****
She was a trained professional, a Shadow Agent, and god damn it, she wasn’t going to cry.
“Come on,” she said, and walked down the grassy slope that had once been a thickly forested hillside.
Elves preferred to build their cities near running water, and deep within the woods. There were few places like that left now, which was another reason they were dying out, but the handful of Clans that were still intact kept their homes partly concealed through magic. Developers tended to look the other way when seeking trees to tear down.
Elven magic wasn’t infallible, however, and the proof of it spread out before her, a plain of rotting blackened tree stumps and piles of scorched stone. A few buildings were still mostly intact, but the center of the village had been obliterated…including the Temple, where most of the Clan had been gathered to wait out the fight.
The mysteries compounded. Clan Cedar had been tipped off that the slavers were coming, and they had called the Agency for help. Ness had sent a cadre of Agents to stop the raid from happening, but somehow the culprits had planted bombs in the village that they waited to set off until the SA was there. The word had not been officially used, but Sara had heard it floating around Ness and the others: trap.
SA-14, a woman about ten years older than Sara who had transferred in from Detroit three years ago, had a handheld device with tracking data and the transmission log. “Over here,” she said, beckoning to the rest of the team. Sara followed her deeper into the ruins.
Midway through she had to stop and bolster her shielding. There was so much pain here, so much death…she could almost hear it, smell it, taste it. Those few Elves who had survived were so traumatized that it was a wonder none of them had died from shock. Several Agents, including SA-7, had been hit by shrapnel, and one had bled to death before help could reach him.
“Right here,” SA-14 said, coming to a halt. She pointed at a neon orange marker flag in the ground. “This is where the bracelet was found.”
Sara knelt beside the flag, letting her hands float down to touch the ground. Funny…however many lives had ended here, life itself went on; there was grass growing in throughout the ruins, and vines were already coiling up around the bases of some of the abandoned buildings. Weeds were sprouting up between the stones of what had once been the main walkway through the village. In a few decades there would be nothing but a tumble of stone covered in ivy and a grassy field dotted with trees to indicate that anyone had ever lived here…that is, if there wasn’t a Wal-Mart parking lot shrouding the land by then.
Was there blood beneath the grass? Had the fragments of Rowan’s body slowly worked their way into the soil, perhaps a few feet from her were there were wildflowers growing? He’d loved wildflowers, especially sunflowers. He hadn’t been able spent much time in the sun the last year, but now he could.
I won’t cry. Not now.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up at SA-14. “Are you all right, Agent 9?”
Sara nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. This is just…were you here?”
A slow shake of her head. “I was on patrol that week, thank god. But the other Agent who didn’t come back was a friend of mine.”
“I’m sorry,” Sara said.
“Me too. For you. For all of us.”
Sara sat back, looking around at the other marker flags that pinpointed where the remains Frog was analyzing were taken from. How many more were dead under their feet? This place was both ghost town and graveyard, and she had to open herself to it…it was a good thing this hadn’t happened a year ago. Back then she wasn’t strong enough and didn’t have the training for something this big.
She could thank Rowan for that…that and so much more, including just being here.
Damn it. Not now.
“Do you know what Elves believe in?” SA-14 asked. “About the afterlife, I mean?”
Sara, shifting from her knees to a cross-legged position, nodded. “They believe in reincarnation, basically. When you die you go to a heaven sort of place for a while and hang out with the God and Goddess, and then you’re reborn when you’re ready. Sometimes it takes hundreds of years to come back, depending on what your life was like and what you went through. Nothing lives forever, not even Elves, but nothing dies forever either.”
SA-14 stared out a
t the trees that swayed gently in the dusk. Even with so much violence the last precious remnants of the Clan still kept the peace here; a few butterflies flitted from one patch of wildflowers to another, and a chorus of birds was already starting its nightly madrigal. A hundred yards or so away the remains of a fountain still had water pooled in it, and a few doves were having their last bath of the day.
“I like that,” SA-14 said. “It’s a beautiful way to see the world.”
“Yeah.”
The Agent returned her attention to Sara. “What do you need us to do?”
Sara took a deep breath. “Spread out and stand guard. I may be out of commission after I’m done, so you might have to help me get back to the van. Otherwise, just keep watch and make sure nothing interrupts.”
“Yes ma’am.” SA-14 relayed the instructions to the others over her Ear; this far from Austin the intra-Agency network didn’t function, but the Ears could be programmed to act as a mini-network for a field team anywhere in the world with a single telepathic link back to the base.
Sara waited until the Agent had taken a position somewhere on the edge of the plain. Then, she removed her Ear and switched it off—she could do psychic work with it on, but for something this delicate she preferred not to have to deal with the signal disruption.
This was going to hurt.
She grounded and centered herself, and said a quick prayer to Whoever might be listening that she would find something, anything, to make losing Rowan easier on them all.
Closing her eyes, she threaded her hands through the new-grown grass until she could feel the warm earth beneath her fingertips. Already she could sense the energy of the soil, the grass, the air surrounding them; if she opened herself to the place, let it talk to her the way buildings did, it might tell her things it couldn't tell anyone else.
As she carefully lowered her outermost protections, she immediately got a sense that not only was the earth willing to speak to her, it was practically frantic to do so, almost like a child trying not to reveal a surprise birthday party. There was something it needed her to know, and it had been waiting for her to come, because none of the others who had been here to examine the destruction had been able to talk like she could. She spoke the language of rock and stone, of timber, of doorways and lintels and foundations, and all those things had come out of the earth. The entire valley wanted to speak with her. It had things to show her, now.
She could have let loose and allowed all that energy to batter her mind at once, but she had spent months learning fine control, so she filtered what she was sensing according to which seemed most insistent, and let the various threads of energy come to her one by one, slowly, so she could hold them in her hands and look them over.
"Speaking" to a place was a misleading term for many reasons, not the least of which was that it involved all her senses, and almost never actual oral speech. The land sensed her with the combined consciousness of every plant, stone, and particle of dirt that comprised it, a million living beings, many sentient, acting as one, speaking with one voice. It was the same as the millions of cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems in the human body all coming together to form a single individual, united by the one thing science had yet to dissect: consciousness. The land had a consciousness too, and it in turn was part of the consciousness of the Earth Herself.
It was to the microcosm she spoke, however. [Show me.]
Then came their first hurdle: this land had been lived upon by Elves for generations, and the only tongue it could give her was Elvish. Again, she cursed herself for never having learned it; the next time she saw Ardeth, she was going to ask him.
She offered the land an impression of her shrugging her shoulders; she didn't understand what it was trying to say. There was a moment of mutual frustration before she tried something else—pure images.
She brought up memories of the Elven city before it was destroyed; she'd seen photographs in the case file.
[Eseteleth] the land spirit said, reflecting the same image back at her. She filed away the word in her memory to have translated later.
[All right. Eseteleth. Then this happened…] She showed images of the destruction, the fires, as captured by shell-shocked Agents at the scene.
Pain—gods, the pain, great oceans of it, the ground burning, the earth scorching, the screams of the dying, the crushing fall of great trees—the land keened into her mind, and she knew she was weeping with it, the agony of having her friends, no, her own body charred to ash and torn apart, so unjustly. The land and its creatures had never hurt anyone. They had lived in harmony and serenity for hundreds of years, until the fires came, until the earth shook.
[I'm sorry…I'm so sorry.] Sara wiped her eyes and let the tears touch the blades of grass at her hands, and the land quieted, feeling her sympathy and her kinship.
Another picture formed in her mind, and it took her a second to decipher it: the village at night, near the center where she was sitting. Off to her right, near what was once the Temple, a shadowy figure lurked out of sight, waiting.
[Bad human?] she asked, then remembered herself and projected a picture of a human with a bomb.
[?]
Damn it. Sara pointed at herself. [Human.] Then again at the image. [Bad human, made this.] She switched back to the devastated village.
There was a pause, and she figured the land was musing over something. She felt it basically shaking its head. [Nen] it said, and at least she knew that word: no.
The shadowy figure appeared again, but this time clearer as he deposited his burden behind the Temple and slipped away, lithe and black as a snake without even leaving footprints.
Footprints—well, that was one thing solved. She could tell just from that much that at least part of the magic on the bombs had been to conceal those who planted them, so there would be no way to track the perpetrators using conventional methods. No footprints, no fingerprints, no obvious energy traces, unless you asked the land, for the land's memory was long and deep.
She followed the figure as he or she escaped the village, meeting up with several others. They spoke to each other quietly, and Sara's heart fell screaming down into her stomach as she realized they were speaking Elvish.
Sure enough, one of the cloaked figures turned just enough that she could see the side of his face, his pointed ear.
"Elves did this," she whispered aloud. "They killed their own people…why?"
But the land had an answer for that, too.
[Jenai] it said.
It lurched her forward in time, and she was afraid for a second that she was going to throw up from the violence of the shift, but she slammed herself back to ground again and the world stopped spinning in time for her to see something that stabbed into her heart more acutely than any blade.
Rowan.
He was armed and dressed as he had been the last time she saw him. She watched him take the path to the Temple and speak briefly with someone there; as he turned away from the building he spoke into his Ear, simultaneously casting a suspicious glance around the courtyard. He knew something wasn't right, almost as if he was being watched…
He was. Oh, god, he was—she could see them hiding, hiding and waiting like lionesses preparing to ambush a lone zebra.
[Mortaea Arbra]
Rowan took another few steps away from the building, speaking again, and he laughed—Sara wondered what was said, wondered what his and Jason's final words to each other had been, before—
Suddenly Rowan froze, his hand flying up to his neck as his body jerked slightly to the left. He pulled his hand away and stared at the dart that had hit his throat, but he didn't even have time to tap his Ear before he fell, still conscious but dazed and unable to move.
Three of the cloaked figures emerged from the darkness and surrounded him. Sara couldn't understand their conversation, but whoever they were, they recognized him—she heard the name "Kaeli," and the expressions of hatred on their faces were chilling. One of them took grea
t delight in kicking Rowan hard in the stomach. He couldn't fight back, couldn't even move, as two of them beat him, laughing as they broke his ribs and left him bleeding on the ground. One of them stomped hard on his arm, and Sara saw it—his silver bracelet bent to the breaking point.
Sara knew she was reaching out, trying to do something, but what she was seeing was only an echo of the past; there was nothing she could do, then or now, to stop them dragging him away, his head rattling against the stone path and leaving a trail of blood. One of his arms trailed out behind, and his bracelet fell from his wrist into the grass, unnoticed.
Not ten seconds after they disappeared, the bombs went off and Clan Cedar was no more. Just like that, a switch thrown, an incantation read, and fifty people were erased.
Sara fell out of the trance gasping, crying, groping for something to hold onto in her mad panic as the enormity of what she had seen hit her over and over again. Her hands found purchase in the dirt, and it almost felt like the earth took them and held on until she could breathe again.
The Agency, Volume II Page 25
