by Gary Jonas
“Coincidence,” I said. I paced the floor then did a quick sweep of the room, checking under the bed and in the shower. I looked behind the doors and checked the curtains. No matter where I turned, I felt like something was behind me.
Watching.
And it was close.
“Calm down, Jonathan,” Esther said. “You're making me nervous.”
“I can't stay here,” I said.
I bolted from the room, moved down the hall, and pounded on Kelly's door.
A moment later, Kelly yanked the door open a few inches and glared at me through the slit. “It's after midnight,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“Does someone need killing?”
“Probably, but that's not why I'm here.”
“Why are you here, Jonathan? What couldn't wait until morning?”
“Technically it is morning.”
She glared at me. “I've killed people for lesser offenses than waking me unnecessarily.”
“I know that. Can I come in?”
She sighed and held the door open so I could enter her room. She wore black panties and a black T-shirt, and she set her sword down so it leaned into the corner beside the door.
“You're jumping the gun, so I'll stay in the hall,” Esther said. “I don't want to watch her hurt you.”
Esther was translucent so Kelly didn't know she was there.
Once I was in Kelly's room, I felt silly.
There was nothing there, and I knew it.
I didn't want to tell her I'd been scared by shadows. She was already unsure of me. I had not earned her respect. She'd known me for a couple of years, but she hadn't spent much time with me. She went on what she called a “spiritual quest” for a couple of years after my showdown with Henry Winslow and the Men of Anubis. Her Jonathan died that night, and I took his body. I was still Jonathan Shade, but I was not the Jonathan Shade she'd worked with. My Kelly Chan had been killed many years before that, so she was Kelly, but not my Kelly. We knew we were tied to one another, but our relationship was strained at best.
Our jaunt through time was supposed to end with us dumped into the void. Instead, I'd worked a deal to keep us alive. Now we were artifacts in time. Simplified, time is a many-layered thing. We'd been pulled from our layers, and new versions of us had lived our lives. The version of me in this reality was dead from a gunshot wound. The Kelly of this reality lived in Denver and taught women martial arts to protect themselves. This Kelly and I were from different realities. Different layers. So we knew alternate versions of one another. Neither of us was supposed to exist. We were dust motes in the sands of time, which landed back in the new reality instead of drifting through eternity in the void.
Kelly sat on her bed. The look she gave me told me she deemed me unworthy.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You've been avoiding me,” I said.
“You noticed.”
“We should really talk.”
“Tonight?”
“No time like the present.”
“Half of me wants to throw you out the window,” she said.
“And the other half?”
“The other half doesn't think we're high enough, so I'm thinking tossing you off the roof might be a better option.”
“And behind curtain number three, we have a much better choice.”
“Cut off your head with my sword?”
“Talk rationally so we can get on the same page.”
“I don't want to talk to you,” she said. “Because of you, I don't have a life.”
“Actually, if not for me, you'd be floating in the void.”
“There was a version of me that liked you?”
“There was a version of you who loved me.”
“You killed my Jonathan,” she said.
“I did not.”
“I don't want to talk about this right now.”
“We need to clear the air,” I said. “I've tried to talk to you, but you're always with Rayna.”
“She's not sure about you either,” Kelly said.
“She loved me.”
“Past tense. You're not the man she knew, and you're definitely not the man I knew.”
“I think I have a case,” I said.
“I don't want you to state your case, Jonathan. I just want to sleep.”
“No, I mean, an actual case. Supernatural problem that needs to be handled.”
“So you have a client?”
“Not exactly.”
“So you don't have an actual case.”
“Not one we're going to get paid to solve, but we don't need money.”
“Is there anyone for me to kill?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I'm not interested. Go back to your room.”
“We still haven't worked anything out.”
“Maybe you really are a detective,” she said and stood. She grabbed my arm and yanked me toward the door. It hurt but I didn't let on.
“Fine,” I said. “I'll see you in the morning.”
“In passing.” She shoved me into the hallway then closed and locked her door.
“Security chain?” I asked. “Really?”
Esther popped into sight. “How did it go?”
“I think it went well,” I said.
“Says you.”
“Hey, I'm still breathing.”
Esther shrugged. “There is that. Still creeped out?”
“Let's see.”
I entered my hotel room again, did another sweep, and felt okay.
“All good?” Esther asked.
“I think so.”
“I'll keep a watchful eye.”
“Thanks.”
I flipped off the light, stretched out on the bed, and when my head touched the pillow, I felt like something was beneath the mattress.
I rolled off the bed.
“Jonathan?” Esther asked.
I clicked the lamp on. “Something is in here,” I said.
“Does this mean you're going to wake Rayna now?”
There was nothing under the bed. I pulled the mattress up and stood it against the wall. Nothing strange about it. The box springs looked normal. I shook my head and put the bed back together.
“My imagination is messing with me,” I said.
“Try and sleep,” Esther said. “I'm here.”
Once again, I turned out the lights and climbed into bed.
Shadows crawled across the ceiling.
I watched them twist and turn.
Headlights reflected through the window.
Nothing to be afraid of.
All was normal.
Street sounds drifted up to my floor. Horns honked; cars passed.
The shadows twitched and seemed to reach toward me.
I took a deep breath, let it out.
The shadows stopped then turned and moved half an inch to the left. It had to be an optical illusion. I forced myself to close my eyes.
Eventually sleep took me away to the land of dreams.
In my dream, smoke poured under my door and coalesced into a demon with razor-sharp claws. It advanced on me, and I drew my Glock. I fired several shots, but they had zero effect. The smoke demon laughed and approached me, claws clicking in the shadows.
A sword appeared in my hands, and my Kelly stood behind me. “You've got this,” she said with a confidence I didn't have.
But if she believed it, I wanted to trust her. She wouldn't believe in me for no reason.
The demon slashed.
I brought the sword around to parry and shattered the claws. Then I grabbed a hair dryer from the ceiling, plugged it into the hilt of the sword, and blew the demon smoke away. I blew on the hair dryer, shoved it in a leather holster on my hip, and turned around to see the demon reassemble and slash toward my face.
I rolled out of bed, waking up in a cold sweat. Fragments of the dream clung to me, and it felt real.
“Go to sleep, Jonathan,�
�� Esther said.
I sat on the floor, scanning the room for anything out of the ordinary.
My heart pounded and I ran a hand down my face. My hand came away slick with sweat. “No sleep for me tonight,” I said.
I turned on the light again, paced the floor, checked the room for the umpteenth time, and found nothing.
Finally I decided to wash off the sweat, so I took a shower.
As the water crashed against my skin, the unease and fear dropped from me like the soapy water swirling down the drain.
I stepped out of the tub, dried myself, and wrapped the towel around my middle. Now I just felt silly for having worried about anything.
Esther poked her head through the bathroom door. “Feel better?”
I nodded. “I'm good.”
“You had me worried.”
I took a deep breath, stared into my eyes in the mirror. I looked normal. “You and me both,” I said.
“That weird feeling,” Esther said. “Anything to do with the potential case?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Is it enough?”
“I wish I had an answer,” I said. I wandered over to the window and gazed out at the lights of New York.
“It has to be enough. I don't want them to go.”
“Welcome to the club,” I said.
“Do you want me to keep looking for something else?” Esther asked.
I shook my head. “Let's see if we can make this work first. We know something weird is going on. We know people have died even though it was a long time ago. We know there's some sort of supernatural thing happening. It doesn't have to be earth shattering. It just needs to be enough to get us working as a team.”
Esther nodded. She understood. We'd been over this many times in the past few weeks. We needed a case. It needed to be a case that I could use to get Kelly and Rayna—but mostly Kelly—to work with me. Esther had searched the city for anything we could investigate. This was the first hint of something that might work. I needed to verify that it was solid enough, though. If it were too simple, Kelly would continue to drift away from me. She was already antsy. She wanted to head out on her own. Maybe I was being too selfish, but I didn't know how to start over again without her. I wasn't sure I could. So she needed to help with a case so we could be close. Build the team. If the tenuous strings snapped, I didn't have the heart to keep going.
When I climbed back into bed, I fell into another nightmare, but this one wasn't filled with danger. It was filled with boredom. Just me and Esther wandering aimlessly down the streets of an unfamiliar city. Lost forever.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kelly agreed to meet me for breakfast, but Rayna claimed she had business to attend to. I knew that was a lie because the version of her in this reality had been murdered by the Marshall Clan, so like me, Kelly, and Esther, she was an artifact in time. So far, I had her convinced that she was stuck with us whether or not she admitted it. But I honored her decision to spend the day alone. My first priority was to get Kelly on board. I couldn't face losing her again.
Esther chose to wait in my hotel room. She could make herself visible to Kelly, but that meant she'd be visible to others too. And she wasn't sure what to say anyway.
I met Kelly in the hotel restaurant. There was a buffet, but we ordered from the menu so we'd have fresher food. It was probably cheaper too. Of course, money was no longer a problem. I had plenty of investments, so I'd never have to work another day in my life unless I wanted to. I'd grown accustomed to having money back in the early part of the twentieth century, and now that I was in the twenty-first century, I was glad I didn't have to readjust to money troubles.
The waitress filled my coffee cup and brought Kelly a tall glass of orange juice. Kelly wore her usual black and had her hair tied back in a ponytail. She studied the menu.
I made a decision and placed my own menu on the table in front of me. Kelly seemed intent on reading each and every description of each and every omelet. After a time, I cleared my throat.
She glared at me over the menu.
“There aren't that many choices,” I said.
“I haven't made a decision yet.”
“Go with the special.”
“Not about the food,” she said. “About you.”
The waitress returned so we put on happy faces and placed our orders as if all were right with the world. When the waitress moved off to another table, Kelly leaned forward in her chair and fixed me with an intense stare.
“I don't like you,” she said.
“You're hurting my feelings,” I said.
“No joking around, Jonathan. You were an old man on his last leg, and you should have had the decency to die and let my Jonathan live.”
Her words punched me harder than anything she could throw at me physically. I told her the truth: “That was my original plan.”
“So you claimed.”
We'd talked about this once, on the night everything went down in 1927. She didn't believe me then, so she disappeared for two years and didn't come back until the day before we were to return to the present. She'd never told me where she'd gone or what she'd done, and I knew it wasn't any of my business. It was clear she didn't believe me now either.
I looked around to make sure none of the other diners were close enough to overhear our conversation. Even so, when we spoke, we kept our voices low.
“I told you the truth,” I said. “Your Jonathan was killed by the Men of Anubis.”
“I know what you said. I did some research on the Men of Anubis. They were simply a family business in ancient Egypt. They performed mummifications.”
“When did you research them?”
“During my time abroad in the twenties.”
“Good,” I said. “I don't want to do much research on them now because I don't want them to know we're here.”
“Explain,” she said.
“I'd rather talk about us and what we're going to do.”
“You don't think this is part of it?”
“Fine. The Men of Anubis were more than just a family business. They learned the secrets of immortality and how to step outside of time. They've been manipulating events through the centuries.”
“You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”
“Some conspiracy theories are true,” I said.
“Name one.”
“9/11.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “Don't tell me you think it was an inside job.”
“No. I think Bin Laden and others conspired to get true believers to fly planes into buildings. It was a true conspiracy, and they pulled it off.”
“No nonsense about building seven?”
“I don't know enough to say.”
“Oh, maybe it was the Men of Anubis,” she said.
“Maybe it was,” I said. “I don't know how heavily involved they are, but I do know they've altered time before.”
“So they can just erase us.”
“Not without coming to us directly,” I said. “We're not connected to anything now. In order for them to kill us, they'll have to find us first. That's why we need to keep things on the down-low.”
“You say they killed my Jonathan.”
“They did. They pulled his spirit right out of his body.”
“With magic? I don't think so.”
“I think the crook and flail of Osiris are technological devices.”
“If you go all Erich von Däniken on me,” she said and held up a clenched fist.
“I don't think aliens are involved,” I said. “I think Egypt had more technology than we know.”
“You were there. What did you see?”
“Nothing that would explain the crook and flail. I think they're from a much earlier civilization. Of people, not aliens. The ones who built the pyramids and the sphinx.”
“So you think the sphinx is much older than the Egyptologists claim?”
“Water erosion from rain. Yes. I think it's thousands of years olde
r than they think. But that's not important right now.”
“You want to track down the Men of Anubis?”
“No. I just want to live my life,” I said. “I want to work cases and help people, and I'd like to earn your friendship.”
“And you don't think the Men of Anubis will find out we're still alive?”
“They might but if we're not going after them, maybe they'll just let us live out our lives. They've been around for thousands of years. We'll be dead in the blink of an eye to them. I think we should let the whole thing go.”
“They killed my Jonathan.”
“They almost killed me too.”
“My loyalty is to the real Jonathan Shade.”
“Hate to break it to you, but I'm the real Jonathan Shade.”
“Not in my eyes.”
“Then let me earn your trust. Give me a chance to show you I'm the same guy at heart. We lived the same life up to a particular time, so the him you knew was me at some point along that line. Certainly up to the time that gunman shot me in the head.”
“That's where you think things changed?”
“A couple of times,” I said.
“So you can see ghosts?”
I nodded. “Including Esther.”
“The secretary who showed herself to me in the office?”
“Yes. In my reality, you and Esther were friends.”
“I was friends with a ghost?” Her voice was flat and full of disbelief.
“You were and I hope you will be again.”
“So why didn't my Jonathan see her?”
“Your Jonathan met her in the twenties, and he's the reason she committed suicide in 1929, so she wasn't layered into your time. She was part of my timeline.”
“So that means my Jonathan was the original.”
“But I'm the one who survived.”
“By stealing my Jonathan's body.”
“It was either that or we’d both be dead.”
The waitress brought our food, and we ate in silence. I let Kelly think about what I'd said. When we finished eating, she dabbed at her lips with her napkin.
“I can't go back to Denver,” Kelly said.
“Not with the intention of starting up your business again. There's a version of you there right now.”
“I may need to see that to believe it.”
