My eyes flipped open instantly. Andy was holding his gun outward, pointed in the direction Amber had gestured toward just seconds before.
I turned, and my mind threatened to melt into jelly in response to what I saw.
A man, with dark skin, darker eyes, and waving black hair stood where Amber had pointed, his arms folded over his chest and his gaze pinned on me. It was like I was looking at a dream, at a vision of the past splayed out before me.
“Garreth?” I muttered instinctively.
“You know this bastard?” Andy asked, pointing the gun at him.
“Sort of,” I said breathlessly. “He’s my son.”
18
“You can’t have children. It’s part of your curse,” Andy said, his gun still pointed right at Garreth’s head. To his credit, my nephew was the only person on this roof (myself included) who didn’t seem stunned by this revelation. The rest of the group stood there, mouths agape, as they looked at the dark man. Unfortunately for Andy, he wasn’t getting the whole story.
“No biologically. No. Garreth is my adopted son,” I said, my eyes still transfixed on the man. He looked exactly the same as the last time I saw him almost twelve hundred years ago. Though, I suppose he could have said the same thing about me. He was dressed differently, of course. But again, so was I. The difference, of course, being that Garreth wasn’t immortal. He was just a man; a man I had raised from a baby after finding him on my doorstep, a man I loved like a son, a man who was taken from me as everyone had been and as everyone would be.
I shuddered. Time was a nasty mistress when you knew she’d touch everyone in the world but you.
“You’re not real,” I said flatly. It was clear to me. Someone, probably the same person who was using Amber to get to me, was inside of my head now. That must have been what saying that word aloud did. Of course, it didn’t explain why that word was in a book in my library, or how it came to be written in that book in my handwriting.
“I most certainly am, Father,” he answered, his dark eyes not breaking with mine.
The way he addressed me shook me to the core and threatened to knock me right off my feet. I had raised more than a few children over the years, and each of them was every bit as important as the others. I hadn’t heard Garreth call me ‘Father’ in nearly twelve hundred trips around the sun, and it brought up memories I was all, but certain I had forgotten.
“That’s impossible,” I spit back. I would have shaken my head to emphasize my disapproval, but I was still wearing this damn contraption.
“Nothing is impossible, Father. You should know that by now.” He took a beat. “You certainly knew it when you raised me.”
Again, a flood of memories from the days when I called Garreth, my son, and he lived under my roof as my own broke through the defenses of my mind. I blinked hard, trying to find my way past them and once again losing myself in a face I never imagined I’d lay eyes on again.
“Enough!” Andy shouted, pulling me back to this moment and this place. “This is a trick, Uncle C. This is meant to mess with your mind, throw you off your game.”
I was already off my game. If I hadn’t been, things would have never gotten this far. Still, Andy had a point. If someone wanted to render me particularly useless, I couldn’t think of a better way than to trot out of the handful of people I had genuinely loved over the endless years.
“I assure you, Andrew, it is not,” Garreth answered, looking from me, to Andy, and back again. “I have nothing more in the way of tricks and deceptions. This was the end goal for those. We have reached it and, as such, there is no more need of them.”
“You tried to kill my daughter,” Merry chimed in, her voice tight and her dripping with venom.
“I would not have killed her,” Garreth answered. “I would not have allowed any harm to come to her.”
“Bullshit,” Clint answered. “You had her straddling the edge of a rooftop.”
“On a night when the wind’s direction and intensity would have made an accidental fall highly unlikely if not impossible,” Garreth shot back. “Trust me, I did my homework, Clint. No harm would have ever come to her.”
“Forgive me if I don’t trust you,” I said, motioning for the others to keep their distance as I walked closer to a man who was—at the very least—wearing the face of someone I thought I knew everything about.
“I wouldn’t expect you to, Father,” Garreth answered. “At least not at first. You’re a smart man, wizened by the weight of unimaginable years. You’ve seen enough to know not to lay your allegiance at the feet of someone you aren’t sure deserves it.”
“Do you blame me?” I asked, inching toward him and reaching for my blade. “Even if you are who you say you are, you infiltrated the mind of an innocent little girl to coerce me into spouting some mystical nonsense. And you did it all in secret. It doesn’t exactly scream trustworthy.”
“All those were necessary evils, I’m afraid.” Garreth nodded. “A subject you taught me very well. Amber was the most logical target.”
“Call my daughter a target again, and I’ll rip our heart out through your throat,” merry growled, clutching her newly released child.
“Highly unlikely,” Garreth shot back. “The semantics of that would prove to be nearly impossible, though your sentiment is noted.” He cleared his throat. “I only meant to make clear the fact that my use of her was not personal. The unique nature of her genetic makeup makes her mind more open to the sort of channeling I used.”
“Unique makeup?” Merry questioned.
“Because she’s half-Romani,” Garreth answered, though he shot me a knowing look. If he didn’t know the truth about the girl, then he at least knew there was truth to discover. “I’m afraid we have to move quickly from this point on,” Garreth continued. “Now that you’ve said the word, the shrouding surrounding the artifact is gone.”
“What artifact?” Andy asked, his gun still raised. “What the fuck is going on? How do you know me? How do you know any of us?”
“I know you because I have watched my father. Through the centuries, centuries when he thought I was dead, save for a very fateful episode nearly one hundred years ago.”
“So you’ve been creeping on us?” Clint asked, “That’s not at all weird.”
“Well, not so much you,” Garreth answered, looking over at the werewolf. “I think we can all admit you’re a peripheral player at best.”
“At least I was there when the chips were down,” he answered. “You been watching us, weirdo? Where the fuck were you when that damn coven and Callum’s bitch of a mother nearly took us all out? When they did take my people out?”
“Good point,” I said. “If you are Garreth, then why weren’t you there? And how the hell are you here exactly? I watched you die in Rome. I watched you grow to an old age. I watched you have a wife and a family, and then I told you goodbye.” I swallowed hard. It was as hard thinking of it now was it had been living through it back then. He was a child gone, my child, and now he was back again…or was he.
“You saw what I wanted you to see, Father,” he answered, swallowing hard and fidgeting. “You saw a lie, a beautiful lie, but a lie nonetheless.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, my jaw setting as I pulled out my knife.
“Don’t bother with that ridiculous thing,” Garreth said, rolling his eyes.
“It’s stronger than it looks,” I shot back.
“Most things are when they’re enchanted to the hilt,” he said, nodding. “But that’s not what I mean. You taught me everything you knew during our time together, Father. And, since then, I’ve learned everything you didn’t.” He shook his head. “You could come at me for a year straight, and you’d never touch me.”
Funny, I didn’t remember Garreth being such a cocky bastard.
“You might be right,” I answered. “Of course, you might be wrong too. I’ve learned a lot since Ancient Rome myself.” I swung the blade through the air.
Garreth didn’t even blink. “Care to test your luck?”
“I’d rather just have a conversation,” he answered. “Though, how about we do something about your current condition first?” Garreth folded his hands into an almost praying stance over his chest, looking down into the peak of them and muttering something in what sounded like an ancient form of Mandarin. Instantly, his hands started glowing with an otherworldly red energy.
“Stop this shit right now!” Andy shouted. “I’ll shoot you in the fucking head.”
“It would miss,” Garreth said, still looking at his glowing hands. “One such as you cannot take a life, not after what you’ve gone through.”
This guy, Garreth or not, seemed to be in the know on all my dirty little secrets.
I was about to open my mouth to shut him up. Andy was already curious about the growing list of weirdos who had strange stuff to say to him. I didn’t need this blast from my past really opening up the floodgates. But, as soon as I started, he turned his folded hands toward me. The red energy shot from his hands and slammed into me, covering me and knocking me flat on my back (a place I had spent far too much time as of late).
I screamed as the movement set my fractured neck on fire. The magic spread throughout my body, sending sparks through me and causing my body temperature to jump up at least ten degrees immediately. At least, that’s what it felt like. That alone should have throw me into a seizure, but it didn’t. Instead, I began to feel a lot better. I could feel the broken pieces of me begin to stitch up.
Above me, I heard shots being fired and watched as Clint rush toward Garreth, shifting into a wolf as he leapt over me.
And then there was Merry. She settled over me, tears forming in those bright eyes as she whispered, telling me everything was going to be okay, though she couldn’t have really known that. I wouldn’t die, of course, and I was actually healing. To her though, it probably looked as though I was suffering through a fate much worse than death.
Haircut was above me too, though he seemed to know enough to stay out of arm’s reach. Even doctors who know a thing or two about the supernatural world, it seemed, didn’t like strange magic.
Then, as the last of my broken bones mended, something wild happened.
I started to remember things. Garreth was being held at knife point by a man named Marcus, a man who had a horrible curse. I was trying to stop him from killing the boy I’d come to know as my son, but that wasn’t the play. Marcus killed himself and passed that curse onto Garreth.
Which of course meant that Garreth-
The magic subsided, and I leapt to my feet, completely healed.
“Stop! Don’t hurt-” I looked up to find that Garreth had handily disposed of both Andy and Clint, leaving them bruised, but likely not hurt, on the floor of the rooftop. “…him…” I muttered.
Swallowing hard, I pulled the contraption off my neck and let it fall to the ground, walking toward Garreth and ignoring questions and pleas from Merry.
“It’s true,” I said. “The life I saw you live was a lie. You screwed with my memory, with what I thought I saw. He gave it to you that day, didn’t he? Marcus gave you-”
“The Wisdom,” he finished, nodding firmly at me. “He gave me the Wisdom of Solomon.”
19
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Andy said, reluctantly pressing a bag of ice against his head while seated at the kitchen table in Merry’s apartment. After I was healed and I saw the truth about what happened to Garreth all those years ago, I convinced everyone things might be easier if we moved our little shindig into a more controlled environment. I told them I was afraid of people walking in on us and asking questions, but the truth was I had placed wards on Merry’s place since the instant I found out the truth about Amber. Those wards were obviously strong enough to keep the Romani out, and they’d be strong enough to keep Garreth from hurting anyone while inside as well.
“Isn’t the Wisdom of Solomon supposed to belong to, you know, Solomon?” Andy asked, glaring up at me from his seat.
I only spared him the most cursory of glances, enough to know the welt on his head was probably going to bruise, before turning back to a refrigerator filled to the brim with Amber’s drawings. They were sunny fields and princess castles; all the crap you might expect to see from the mind of a normal little girl. She wasn’t normal, of course, but I had other issues to deal with right now.
“It did,” I answered, turning back to the group. Everyone but Garreth was here, even Haircut, who had warned Andy he might have a concussion. He’d have given Clint the same news if not for the healing properties of his shifting.
Garreth was in the living room, having sworn to stay put and not even flinching as Andy hooked one handcuff to his arm and the other to one of the lead bars lining Merry’s window.
“Solomon was smart. He prayed for wisdom and the Big Guy gave it to him, made him the wisest dude on the whole damn planet.” I grinned. “There was this one time-”
“We know. He told the mothers to cut the baby in half,” Merry said, brushing through Amber’s hair with her fingers.
“You heard that one?” I asked jokingly.
“Everyone’s heard that one,” Andy answered gruffly. “Just get to the point while we’re still young. It seems to be less common than I would have originally thought, but some of us are actually here.”
I grinned at the detective and shook my head. Even pissed off, my nephew was kind of endearing. It reminded me of his father.
“It didn’t die with him,” I said flatly. “Things created by the Big Guy tend to be very long-lived. They don’t usually disappear from the world.”
“Aren’t we created by the—by God?” Clint asked, pointing to his decidedly bare chest. Merry had managed to scrounge up a table cloth for wolf (who’d clothes had blown apart Hulk style when he shifted) to wrap around his waist, but a man’s shirt seemed to be out of the question. “Why aren’t we long lived?”
“Speak for yourself,” I muttered. “Seriously though, I’m not talking about living things, myself excluded. Curses, blessings, promises; they tend to be for keeps. It’s why I’m still around after all these years, it’s why the world’s never been destroyed in a flood again after he promised to keep that card off the table, and it’s why Garreth is walking around with the combined knowledge of the entire world banging back and forth between his ears.”
“Is that why he doesn’t age?” Amber asked, scrunching her nose and pushing bangs out of her eyes. It was good to hear her chime in.
“Not exactly,” I answered, keeping my tone soft and my voice free from chiding. “Solomon died after a normal—if spectacular—life. All the people who inherited the Wisdom afterward did as well. But the Wisdom comes with knowledge of everything, including magic. I can only assume he’s using some sort of magic to keep himself alive.”
“Like your mother did,” Andy muttered, dropping the bag of ice onto the table. “You saw what that did for her.”
“Don’t do that,” Haircut said. “It’ll-”
Andy gave him a look that would have stopped traffic. “I still don’t know what the fuck you are. So I’m not taking medical advice from you.”
I sighed, looking over at the doctor. I’d give Andy and the others all the answers they needed about the jovial medical worker, but I figured it was best to deal with things one anomaly at a time, and right now, Garreth was the one who took precedent.
“My mother died,” I said firmly. “She clawed her way out of hell after countless lifetimes there. Garreth didn’t die at all. It’s a completely different situation. A situation like mine.”
“If he’s even that guy at all,” Andy scoffed, reading my face. “Don’t you go making comparisons of the two of you. The last thing I need is for your ginger ass to start singing The Courtship of Eddie’s Father theme song and lose your damn mind over a guy whose identity is still up in the air.”
“It’s not up in the air,” I answered. “And good job with the
Courtship reference,” I said, looking around at the median age of our group. “Even if I am pretty sure I’m the only one who got it.”
“It most certainly is up in the air, Uncle C. We don’t know who we’re dealing with. For all we know, this guy is a shape shifter or a psychic who’s projecting memories from your brain and wearing them like a jacket.” He shook his head. “It’s not smart to go trusting him off the rip like this.”
“Who says I’m trusting him?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest. “I believe this is Garreth, not because he says he is or because he looks like him, but because it makes sense. I had spent the last twelve hundred years wondering why Marcus Ambrose had been the final carrier of the Wisdom. It didn’t make any sense, but this does.” I pointed to my head. “He pulled memories out of my brain the last time we spoke.”
“That doesn’t seem like something someone who considered himself your son would do,” Merry said.
“He would if I asked him,” I said. “Which I did.”
“And why the hell would you go and do a stupid thing like that?” Andy asked.
“Because of what we were doing,” I said firmly. “The Wisdom isn’t the only thing that’s past on when its owner dies because it’s not the only thing the Big Guy bestowed upon Solomon.” I took a deep breath. “Have you ever heard of the Ring of Solomon.”
“Unless Disney made a movie about it in the last five years, I certainly haven’t,” Merry mumbled.
“It’s a tool,” I said. “But, in the wrong hands, it could also be a weapon. Solomon was having trouble with demons, the kind of trouble no amount of wisdom can get you out of. So the Big Guy forged a ring. It could control the demons. With it, Solomon could run them out of his lands, but he could also make an army.”
“I don’t like where this is going,” Andy said.
“It doesn’t matter what happened to Solomon,” I said. “The ring was passed on with the Wisdom, and it went to Garreth, but he couldn’t keep it.”
Curse of Cain (Immortal Mercenary Book 2) Page 11
