“They were wonderful people, your parents,” Faye commented in a low voice. “They loved life, and they had the enthusiasm of children whenever they were able to locate a unique artifact. I believe their last mission had something to do with Asherah, the Canaanite goddess. They made phone contact with the local trove keeper shortly after they landed in Israel. Then they disappeared into the desert and were never seen again.”
Cassie cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Which means nobody knows what really happened to them.”
Faye shook her head. “The artifact they were sent to find was later seen in the possession of a Nephilim operative, so we know who was responsible.”
Cassie was quiet for a long while. “I guess that makes it simpler,” she said at last. “A single spot to lay the blame. The Nephilim are the one and only reason that my entire family is gone.”
“We’re still here,” Faye added quietly. “You aren’t alone.”
Cassie nodded, blinking back a few tears. “It helps to know that. It really does.”
Faye asked cautiously, “Do you want to postpone these exercises for another time?”
Cassie shook her head. “No. I’m OK, really. I’ve had some time to sort this out and get used to the idea. I just needed to hear it from you. Now I’d rather think about something else. Anything else, in fact.”
She poured herself another cup of tea, regarding the curious objects laid out on the coffee table before her. Changing the subject abruptly, she asked, “So what’s this about? More validation to prove I’m the real deal?”
“Not exactly. We’re all quite convinced you have the necessary talent to help us. You should consider this more of a training session to hone your skills.”
Her appetite returning, Cassie reached for a cookie. “What’s to hone? I pick something up, I have a psychotic episode, and then I tell you what I see.”
Faye chuckled. “Surely you meant to say ‘psychic’ episode.”
“Nope,” Cassie replied. “I meant what I said. Psychotic. Picking up that bowl last time I was here made me feel I was losing my mind.”
“Ah, I understand. In that case, you should find this training especially helpful. We’re going to attempt to put you in control of your visions rather than being at their mercy.”
“I’m all for that,” the girl agreed readily. She dusted crumbs off her jeans. “Where do we start?”
“Why don’t we begin by working left to right,” Faye suggested. “Just pick up an object and tell me what you sense.”
***
Twenty minutes later, Cassie had accurately identified two of the items. The first was a clay pot created by the pre-overlord inhabitants of Egypt. The second was a fake—a stone cat which usually sat in Faye’s garden. It had been made in a factory in China.
“You tricked me.” Cassie registered annoyance.
“Forgive me, my dear,” Faye chuckled at the ruse. “I wanted to see how perceptive you would be if faced with a forgery.”
“Did I pass?” the girl asked archly.
“With flying colors.” Faye’s face took on a serious expression as her smile faded. “I assure you the next one is not a fake.”
Cassie looked down at the third object sitting on the coffee table. It was about three inches high. A carving made from a polished piece of dark stone. It was a small figure with arms outstretched at right angles to the body. The figure wore a skirt with slanted lines incised across it. There were no feet so that the lower half of the body had a tubular appearance. The outstretched arms were squared off with holes bored into the ends. The rounded breasts indicated that the figurine was female, but the face was not human. It was the head of a woman wearing a bird mask. The beak jutted out prominently from the place where a nose should be. The eyes were enormous and shaped like horizontal teardrops. It was odd and off-putting—the strangest relic Cassie had seen yet.
She picked it up hesitantly. “OK, here we go,” she said.
There was no warning. She was running or rather he was running. His lungs were burning from the effort to pull in enough air. Something was bumping against his collarbone as he ran. Cassie knew it was the bird woman figurine hanging from a rawhide string around his neck. There were tall pine trees surrounding his village. Both the trees and the village were on fire. He wasn’t merely choking from the effort to breathe fast enough. He was choking from the smoke boiling out of the doors of houses. People were running in every direction, trying to escape the blaze. The scene was chaos. He ran forward toward a little girl—a toddler. She was standing some distance away from him, crying. Barely breaking stride, he scooped her up in his arms. Then Cassie noticed sounds coming from behind them. First screams and then thunder that seemed to surge up from the ground. The man briefly stole a glance over his shoulder. There was a beast bearing down on him. Half human. He didn’t know what it was. He’d never seen such a creature before. He didn’t know, but Cassie recognized it—a horse running at full gallop and closing the gap between them. Its rider bent low over the animal’s neck urging it forward. The man couldn’t run very fast because of the child in his arms. She was wailing now, her small voice merging with the shrieks echoing from every direction. The rider swung his arm downward. His long knife slashed into the side of the man’s neck. The runner crumpled over, and Cassie felt herself choking, clawing at her own throat before everything went black.
***
She didn’t know how long she had been gone. Faye was shaking her gently by the shoulder.
“Cassie, Cassie, wake up! You’re here with me. You’re all right.”
The girl tried to speak, but no sound emerged. For some reason she was lying on her back on what she assumed was Faye’s couch. Her eyelids fluttered open. Faye’s face was bent over hers. The old woman’s features gradually came into focus.
Cassie’s hand flew to her neck. There was no blood. She tried to speak again. “Wha… what…” She swallowed hard. Her mouth felt dry. Sitting up, she propped her head in her hands until the room stopped spinning.
Faye sat beside her, rubbing her shoulders. “Just sit still until you feel stronger.” The old woman sighed heavily. “My dear, I am so sorry. There was no good way to prepare you for this. You’ve had your first experience with a tainted artifact.”
“A… a… a what?” Cassie finally managed to ask.
“Some of our finds have unfortunate past associations. I’m guessing that you experienced something…unpleasant?”
“Unpleasant?” Cassie croaked out the word. “Try murder!” She was feeling stronger and also angrier. The anger steadied her. She glared at Faye. “Somebody got his throat cut, or maybe it was mine. I felt like I was being killed! You never told me that might happen.”
Faye looked contrite but determined. “I’m sorry to put you through this, but I had to know how you would react to a contaminated relic. If you were to encounter an object like this on a field expedition and you weren’t prepared…” She trailed off. “Well, it would be too late, wouldn’t it? This bird goddess figurine was the last recovery Sybil brought to us before she died. It came from a Vinca settlement that had been destroyed sometime around 4200 BCE.”
The old woman handed her a glass of water. “Here, drink this.”
Cassie reached eagerly for the glass. Her mouth felt as if she had swallowed gravel. She gulped down the contents without pausing for breath. When she finished, she exhaled deeply and sat up straighter. “That’s a little better,” she reassured her hostess.
Faye returned to her chair and regarded Cassie with a troubled expression. “Are you sure?”
“I’m fine, really.” Cassie rubbed her temples. “Guess this must be the nature of the job.”
The old woman tilted her head and studied Cassie’s face intently. “It isn’t the nature of the job so much as the nature of the individual pythia.”
“What?”
“I believe you’re acutely sensitive even for someone with psychic
abilities. You’re a natural-born empath whether you know it or not.”
“An empath?” Cassie echoed, uncomprehending.
“Yes, that’s someone who has the ability to sense what other people are feeling. In fact, you are able to feel what the people around you feel as if it were happening to you.”
Cassie shrugged offhandedly. “Sort of. I thought everyone did that.”
Faye gave a humorless laugh. “I assure you, they do not. Maybe if they did, the world would be a better place. The principle of ‘do unto others’ would be implicitly understood. If an empath were to hurt someone deliberately, she would be able to feel the pain she was causing. Empathy can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a tremendous gift. On the other, a tremendous burden to be saddled with so much of other people’s emotional baggage. I suspect that you absorb it like a sponge.”
“I don’t know how to turn it off,” Cassie admitted. “Maybe that’s why being alone can be a relief sometimes. Not so much toxic clutter in my head when I’m by myself.”
“Perhaps I can help you with that. Wait here.” Faye rose and slowly ascended the staircase to the second floor. Cassie could hear the floorboards creaking above and drawers being opened and shut as Faye searched for some unknown object.
When the old woman returned, she was smiling. “I found it at last.” She held out a necklace toward Cassie. A black stone disc suspended from a silver chain.
After her most recent episode, the girl was wary of touching any strange object.
Faye laughed. “It’s all right. This isn’t an artifact. It’s an obsidian pendant. Very good for protection and blocking negative energy. Take it.”
“You think some New Age trinket is going to protect me?” she asked incredulously.
Faye returned to her chair. “Those people who believe in the vibrational properties of crystals would say that obsidian is a grounding stone. It will anchor the energy of the wearer. Keep your feet on the ground so to speak.”
“I feel safer already,” Cassie murmured ruefully as she fastened the clasp of the necklace.
“On the other hand,” Faye continued, “from a purely practical standpoint, it also functions very well as a mnemonic device. If you focus a part of your mind on the pendant while reading an artifact, you should be able to keep your identity separate from the more unpleasant aspects of the telemetric experience.”
“You’re saying if I pay attention to the black disk, I can avoid feeling like my throat is being cut?” she asked bluntly.
“Exactly,” the old woman confirmed. “In the beginning, it might even be helpful to keep one hand wrapped around the pendant while you perform a telemetric reading with the other hand. Over time, it should become second nature. You will only need to think of the pendant for it to split your focus.”
“It’s worth a shot.”
“Then shall we try again?” Faye suggested calmly.
Cassie’s heart skipped several beats. “You don’t mean you want me to pick up that creepy little bird woman again, do you?”
“If you fall off a horse—”
“I don’t care about falling off a horse. I care about the one in my vision that was about to trample me!” Cassie exclaimed.
“If you’d rather wait, we can do this another time.”
Cassie remained motionless for a few moments, considering her options. She could feel Faye silently willing her to continue. Eventually, she gave in. “What the heck. I suppose I should get it over with now. It’ll be worse for me if I wait. I know I’ll have nightmares about it.”
The old woman nodded approvingly. “Very good. Close your eyes and grip the obsidian disc in your left hand for a few moments. Just concentrate all your attention on it. Tug lightly on the chain and feel its connection to your neck. Now, reach out your other hand and pick up the figurine of the bird goddess.”
***
It took six agonizing tries before Cassie finally caught her balance. The first time, she lost herself immediately and began drowning in the massacre. When she was thrown clear, she refocused her attention more intensely on the black stone disc. A second, a third, a fourth time. With every new attempt, she held onto a shred of herself a little longer before the atrocity consumed her. By the sixth try, she was able to split her awareness and watch the terrible scene unfolding as if she were watching a horror movie from the safe vantage point of the audience.
“It still leaves me feeling awful,” she commented to Faye after her final successful try.
By this time Faye had brought in a fresh pot of tea and a plate of cucumber sandwiches. She served more refreshments for both of them. “That just means you have a conscience,” the old woman observed. “No feeling person could witness the murder of an innocent without some sympathy for the unfortunate victim.”
“What happened to those people?” the girl asked. “Why were they being massacred?”
“You forget you haven’t told me the details of everything you observed.”
“Oh, that’s right!” Cassie exclaimed. She then proceeded to give Faye all the sickening particulars of the scene.
The old woman’s face drained of color. “Well, it’s done, and now we know. You’ve had your trial by fire.”
Cassie took a bite of her sandwich. Unaccountably, she was feeling better. “The upside is that it can’t get much worse, can it?”
“No, it certainly can’t. And you’ve just proven your ability to overcome difficult situations.” Faye studied the girl’s face for a few moments. “You really are a most extraordinary young woman.”
Cassie blushed. Nobody had ever called her extraordinary before. She had always been treated like somebody’s appendage or maybe just their baggage. First, she was toted around by her parents and afterward by Sybil. She’d never been anything in her own right.
“Extraordinary?” she repeated. “What makes you say that?”
Faye smiled. “Given the recent shocks you’ve experienced in your life, I can’t think of a single person of your age who would willingly relive a scene of such horror. Not once but six times. It was quite brave of you.”
The girl shrugged offhandedly. “Maybe stubborn is a better word. I hate to quit. It comes from all the moving around I did as a kid. I never got to finish anything.”
“In our line of work, tenacity is a virtue.”
“Speaking of tenacity, a while ago I asked you why all those people were massacred. I still want to know.”
“Ah, yes.” Faye stirred sugar into her tea contemplatively. “You’ve just seen an overlord invasion in all its glory.”
“‘Glory’ is a strange word to use for it,” the girl observed grimly. “‘Gory’ might be better.”
“Yet how often history books like to use ‘glory’ to describe acts of viciousness.” Faye sighed expressively. “The Vinca were among the last inhabitants of old Europe before the Kurgan invasions.”
“What do you mean by old Europe? To an American, everything in Europe seems old.”
Faye laughed softly. “Then maybe I should call them the original inhabitants of Europe. You see, what we think of as European civilization was founded on the destruction of previous cultures. Some far more sophisticated than that of the barbarians who displaced them. The Vinca were one such culture. They lived in southeastern Europe. Many of their artifacts were found near Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
“The Vinca were peaceful agriculturists. They possessed domesticated cattle and lived in villages with laid-out streets and two-story houses. Superb craftspeople. Their pottery and sculpture are more advanced than anything produced by their successors. The arrangement of graves and the magnitude of goddess statues suggest that they, too, were matristic. As you might have guessed by now, the bird goddess was their principal deity. They may even have invented the first written script. Archaeologists have found tablets dating to 5000 BCE with pictograms and symbols that recur in later matristic cultures on Crete and Cypress. The Vinca
flourished between 5000 BCE and 4300 BCE, at which time they were displaced by the first wave of Kurgans.”
“Let me guess,” Cassie said archly. “The Kurgans are overlord bad guys.”
“Yes, certainly bad for the Vinca and everybody whose lands they invaded though there were reasons why their culture became as violent as it did. Over time, I expect you’ll learn a great deal about the why and wherefore of their behavior. Much more than I can tell you now. Suffice it to say that a wave of Kurgan invaders left the Russian steppes and moved westward—driving out the inhabitants and taking their lands. They imposed a war-based male-dominated society on the folk who remained. The first evidence of violent death in southeastern Europe dates from the arrival of the Kurgans. The archaeological record shows over eight hundred villages burned around that time. Some people fled west into more inaccessible regions such as the Alps. Those who could not escape were either murdered or assimilated into the new Kurgan world order.”
“Why are they called Kurgans?” Cassie nibbled a crustless sandwich while Faye spoke.
“The burial practices of the invaders were very different from that of the Vinca and other cultures of old Europe. Kurgan is a Russian word meaning barrow. A barrow is a manmade hill. These people buried their dead, especially their important male leaders, in raised mounds. Frequently the chief’s wife was ritually murdered to accompany him into the afterlife—along with his favorite horse, of course.”
Cassie darted a swift look at Faye to see if she was joking.
Reading her expression, the old woman said, “I assure you, it’s all disturbingly true. Horse skulls and weapons were interred with the deceased.”
“I’m glad they’re not around anymore,” Cassie commented.
“Oh, but they are, though they’ve learned some manners over the ages. In fact, anyone of European origin is either a descendent of theirs or of the people they victimized.”
Cassie gulped down the remainder of her sandwich. It occurred to her that there were some things about her family tree that she’d rather not know.
The Arkana Mysteries Boxed Set Page 14
