“He was dead.” Rosamund sounded calm, interested, like a scientist reciting the results of an experiment. “I am sure. I held his body while it grew cold.”
Everyone in the kitchen shifted uncomfortably.
Still in that calm voice, Rosamund continued. “The paramedics, or whoever they are in France, must have felt the rumbling in the earth. Or maybe they always expect disaster when someone finds the cave, but they showed up with stretchers, one for him and, I guess, one for me.”
“You weren’t hurt at all?” Isabelle leaned around Aaron to watch Rosamund with a worried frown.
Aaron thought he knew what it was. During Rosamund’s sojourn in Irving’s library, the women had grown to know her. Now something about her had changed. Her expressive, mobile face seemed more mature. She no longer waved her hands to punctuate her points, and maybe that was because her shoulder hurt, but he didn’t think so. Rosamund had changed. Sometime between the beginning of their journey to Casablanca and this moment, she seemed to have lost something precious—her unquestioning trust that something wonderful was about to occur.
“No. Aaron protected me with his body, or rather with the dark mist he becomes when he”—Rosamund caught her breath as if remembering that time in the closet—“when he works.”
Aaron picked up her hand. Her fingers were cold, almost as if she had died, too.
“Dr. Servais confirmed Aaron had died of his injuries—”
Irving interrupted. “Servais? Female, short, broad in the beam, abrupt in manner?”
“Yes, that’s her,” Rosamund confirmed. “Although she wasn’t abrupt right then. She was very kind about Aaron, and very firm about me needing to return here.”
Irving exchanged a look with Martha. “She’s a former Chosen, very gifted in healing, but argumentative and assertive.”
“For a woman, you mean?” Jacqueline asked coolly.
Irving didn’t seem to catch her point. Maybe he really didn’t. Maybe he figured that at his age, he could be a chauvinist if he chose. “Servais was very unfeminine. She returned to France—she disagreed with my insistence that we keep on budget—and we haven’t heard from her in years. I wonder what she’s up to.”
“She has become a doctor, an amazing doctor,” Aaron told him. “And . . . well, I don’t know what else she is. As you say, she is very gifted.”
Rosamund turned to Aaron, and again with that scientific note of inquiry in her voice, she asked, “Can you tell us what happened?”
Aaron spoke to her and her alone, weighing her reactions, trying to understand her. “I . . . my being . . . was in the depths of the Sacred Cave.” He heard her inhale sharply, saw her face twist with . . . what? Anguish? Guilt?
Then her face smoothed again, and she became Rosamund, the analytical listener. “How did you know you were in the depths of the Sacred Cave? Have you been there before?”
“No, but my first breath was taken in the Sacred Cave, and I recognized the smell of molten rock and death. I remembered a death and I knew it was me who had died. I was stretched out on my back. I couldn’t open my eyes. Outside the chamber, I could hear this horrible gibbering and howling.” His mouth dried with remembered fear. “I was afraid of whatever that was, wherever it was. It wanted me, and I was helpless.” He glanced around.
Charisma’s eyes were full of tears. Jacqueline had both fists up to her mouth. Isabelle had her head turned away as if she wanted to escape, and the men were pale.
Rosamund was stoic.
“Inside the chamber with me, I could hear this woman arguing in French. I’m not sure who she was—someone very brave to have accompanied me so far.”
“Was it Dr. Servais?” Rosamund asked.
“Maybe. But the chamber was huge. Her voice echoed and rolled.” He shook his head. “I can’t be sure.”
“I think it must have been her.” Rosamund sounded thoughtful, logical. “Because . . . well, please finish, Aaron.”
“Thank you.” When had Rosamund grown so serenely polite? “I don’t know who the woman was arguing with, because I never heard anyone answer, but she was giving him hell.” He winced at his own idiom. “She said the sacrifice had been made, the terms of the deal satisfied, but the sacrifice of my life for Rosamund’s had to be weighed in the balance. No one answered, at least not that I heard, but finally, she said, ‘Bon! C’est fini.’ And I opened my eyes, and I was in this room over the top of the tap house at Sacre Barbare, with Dr. Servais leaning over me giving me—” He stopped himself. “She was haranguing me for going up to the Sacred Cave when she had told me not to. She said lots of people managed to ignore the call of the cave until the end of their lives, and she said it would be wise if I stayed out of the deep places of the earth from now on.”
“Amen, brother,” Samuel said.
Aaron continued. “She told me to be careful, because I’d been hurt badly, but that she had worked on my case, and I was better now.”
“Did you tell her you’d been dead?” Isabelle asked.
“I couldn’t talk about it then. It was too soon, too close.” Aaron cleared his throat and admitted, “I was still terrified.”
Around the table, heads nodded.
“Then she arranged for me to come home. She said I needed to come home because there were things I needed to do. Of course, she was right.” Aaron touched Rosamund’s face and smiled at her.
Her skin was cool. Her eyes were cool.
“It is all very weird,” Aaron concluded, but he was no longer talking about his own death.
“I’ll give you weird on that one.” Samuel shuddered as if spooked.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.” Irving stroked his coffee cup and stared, narrow-eyed, at Aaron. Raising his voice, he asked, “Martha, have you?”
“No, sir. Most Chosen just die, or they don’t. Or they’re injured like poor Gary White, and lie there in a coma for years.” Martha placed a broad wooden board on the table, filled with freshly cut hot bread. “But to come back to life . . .” She shook her head.
McKenna brought small plates of olive oil and pesto, salami and pepperoncini, grapes and cheese.
“How do you feel?” Isabelle stroked the bruise on Aaron’s face, the cut on his ear.
Samuel tensed.
Aaron didn’t care if Samuel was jealous. Isabelle was their empath, their healer, and her light touch spread strength through his body, and that strength pooled in the places where he’d been most injured—in his head, his hand, his shoulder, his thigh.
Isabelle answered her own question. “You’re a little achy, and you’re delicate, but with a little rest, you’ll be fine.”
“The fight today was rough,” he said. “If I’d been one hundred percent, I would have performed better. But nothing on me got seriously injured. It was Rosamund who was tortured.”
Isabelle stood and came to Rosamund, and ran her hand over her shoulder. “That really hurts. Did they give you something for the pain?”
“Yes, but you’ve made it feel better than drugs ever could.” Rosamund did look better; she had color in her face, and she sipped her tea with more enthusiasm. Quietly she added, “I guess empathic healing is your gift then.”
Isabelle nodded.
At the same time, Rosamund looked at Aaron con sideringly. “I saw you die, and now I wonder—will you get to remain on this earth?”
“Oh . . .” That was why she was offhand. That was why she’d refused to marry him. She’d suffered so much with his first death—embarrassing as it was to admit, he hoped she had suffered—she was afraid he was going to make her a widow again soon. “Do I get another get-out-of-jail-free card? I would guess not.”
No. Her lips moved, but nothing came out.
She had loved him. She had suffered. He was sure of it now, and sure, too, that when she was over this shock, she would become the old, enthusiastic Rosamund once more. He injected heartiness in his voice. “Hopefully I’ll be here until I die a natural death of old age.”<
br />
Maybe a little too much heartiness, for she once again assumed that mask of . . . of . . . not indifference. Surely it couldn’t be indifference.
“Sure. You’ll die a natural death of old age—if you don’t get rubbed out by the Others first,” Samuel said.
Rosamund’s fingernails suddenly bit into Aaron’s hand.
Aaron heard a hard thump from under the table.
Samuel jumped.
Another hard thump.
He jumped again. “That hurt!” He glared at Isabelle on one side of him, at Charisma across the table.
“Whatever is wrong, Samuel?” Isabelle asked with gentle innocence.
“Yeah, Sam, whatever is wrong?” Charisma flashed her leather bracelets with the stainless steel studs.
Jacqueline muttered, “I wish I was sitting closer.”
Caleb leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “That’s our Sam. Making friends everywhere he goes.”
“Fine,” Samuel snapped. “He’ll survive. We’ll all survive—but not without the damned prophecy!”
“Samuel.” Martha put a plate of antipasti in front of him. “Fill your mouth with something besides words. Eat something.”
“If the prophecy is all it takes for you to survive, then we’re in good shape,” Rosamund said.
“How do you figure?” Samuel asked.
Rosamund’s lips curved in the slightest and most superior of smiles. “I found the prophecy in my own library.”
Chapter 40
Ababble broke out around the table, but Rosamund could only hear Aaron’s voice saying, “Well done, my darling. Well done.” He placed his palm against her cheek and kissed her.
She kissed him back, of course. She couldn’t not. But she held a precious piece of herself in reserve, and when he drew back with a frown, she knew he had tasted the distance between them.
He wanted to ask. She could see that. He was ready to ask.
Then Samuel, bigmouthed, caustic, hard-nosed lawyer Samuel, interrupted. “So, Rosamund, what is it? What did you find?”
“Be quiet, Samuel. Let them have their moment.” Isabelle watched them with a kind of stark loneliness on her lovely face.
Rosamund straightened away from Aaron. “No. It’s fine. We were done.” Clearly, Aaron was not done with her, but she thankfully escaped into her report. “The prophecy was given by a lady captured in war, enslaved by the Mayans, worked until she was black from sun, and when she revealed her visions, she was taken to the white temple. The priests didn’t believe in her. Then she proved her skill, over and over, and so at last they wrote down her guiding vision on the stone tablet my mother recovered from a cenote in Guatemala.”
Martha filled more plates. McKenna passed them around.
The Chosen Ones listened more intently than anyone had ever listened to Rosamund before.
“The Mayan language is not my specialty—my father didn’t encourage my interest, and now I know it was because my mother was murdered in pursuit of this prophecy.” The urge to cry caught Rosamund by the throat, squeezing with sorrow’s fingers.
She shook it off. She took a long, slow breath to contain her tears.
“Did Bala’s Stone help you?” Irving nibbled on a piece of crusty bread, and a shower of crumbs dusted the table before him.
She turned to him at once, grateful to be dragged back away from the chasm of grief that yawned at her feet. If she concentrated on what she had to say, on her desire for vengeance against the Others for the deaths of her parents, for the death of Louis, for the death of . . .
Her gaze flew to Aaron.
Aaron was alive. He was watching her, and he was alive, and she had no reason to feel as if her composure hung on the sharpest point of a blade.
Tearing her attention from him, she pushed aside the small plate McKenna placed before her—she couldn’t force food down her tight throat—and with the brisk efficiency she lent to her reports to the library board, she said, “Very much. I couldn’t have done so much translation in so short a time without it. Unfortunately, the police wouldn’t let me take my notebook with me. And there’s one other thing. When the stela disintegrated—”
“Disintegrated? How did it disintegrate?” Caleb asked.
“It broke apart and turned to sand when I hit Lance’s face with it.” Even now she could remember the feel of the dry grit in her hands, and feel the moment of heartbreak at the destruction of the historical object Elizabeth Hall had died to retrieve. “My mother found the stela in a water-filled cenote, so it was soaking for a thousand years. When it was brought up, it should have been cared for, but my mother was dead and I think . . . that is, I realize now my father was angry and anxious. He apparently couldn’t bring himself to destroy the stela, so he cleaned it up and put it away in his library, where it would be safe.”
“But it should have been kept in water to preserve the stone.” Irving wasn’t guessing; he knew his way around ancient artifacts.
“Exactly. I was lucky Father placed it on a board. When I pulled it out of the drawer, it was supported, and I didn’t realize how fragile it had become. I should have realized. . . .” She shook her head at her own foolishness. “I would have if I’d had more time. I was simply so thrilled to have found this precious thing that held a piece of my mother’s heart, I wanted to examine it immediately. Then Lance and Aaron came in, and then—” She caught herself. Then Lance and Aaron came in, both to ask about a prophecy; her safe world was broken and reshaped into a place of mystical terror.
“Can you remember the details of the prophecy?” Aaron asked. “Or should I go to the library and steal your notebook?”
Her heart leaped, then beat like a Kentucky Derby racer. “No! Don’t . . . steal . . . anything. Don’t . . .” She held up a hand, realized it was shaking, and tucked it into her lap. “I remember everything I read. It’s very simple, very forthright. The prophetess of Otoch Sak said that when the Chosen Ones had taken the wrong path and vanished from this earth, leaving only the infant Chosen to defend the weak, then each of those Chosen must find their true love and sacrifice the greatest thing for that love. When they did that, they would receive their full powers.” She said apologetically, “I don’t know why she said the Chosen Ones had taken the wrong path, but the Mayans were great with calendars, and she placed the date on the day that the Gypsy Travel Agency was destroyed.”
“Whew.” Even Samuel was impressed enough to stop eating.
“That’s deep.” Charisma poured a puddle of olive oil onto her plate and dipped her bread. “What happened to the prophetess?”
“The priests killed her,” Rosamund said.
“They ripped her heart out?” Isabelle didn’t seem surprised, and when Rosamund nodded, Isabelle said, “So to give us this prophecy, she did sacrifice her greatest thing—her life.”
Samuel didn’t seem impressed. “So we have to find true love and sacrifice the greatest thing. What thing? Do we have to do like the prophetess, and get axed?”
“I don’t know,” Rosamund said. “Those were the prophetess’s words.”
“That’s helpful,” he said. “Are you sure you interpreted her correctly?”
“Yes.” Rosamund decided she not only did not like Samuel; she did not like having her expertise questioned. “I wouldn’t make false claims and lead you astray. These Others killed my parents. I have at least as great an interest in the Others’ extinction as you do.”
“Fair enough.” Samuel nodded gruffly. “So how do we know if we’ve found our true love, et cetera?”
“The proof that you’ve succeeded is you get another mark or tattoo, or the one you have is enhanced,” Rosamund answered.
Jacqueline looked at her palms.
“But all seven of you must succeed before the next cycle of the Chosen—” Rosamund began.
“We’ve got seven years, kids.” Charisma grinned. “We can do it!”
Rosamund continued. “Or you lose your gifts and the Others are trium
phant, able to wreak their havoc without anything or anyone to stop them.”
“Oh, good. There’s nothing to it.” Now Isabelle sounded as sarcastic as Samuel.
“No, it’ll work!” Aaron sprang to his feet. “I mean, it does work. Listen—I was born in the Sacred Cave, and left there by a mother who leaped to her death for the shame of having me. I was meant to be a sacrifice to the cruel old gods, but my foster father saved me, and ever since, I have been running away from that cave, knowing that if it could take me, it would, and keep me there in the depths of the earth for all eternity. Every day of my life, I’ve heard the call of the Sacred Cave, and fought against it. Then the gods, or fate, or mere chance put Rosamund into my life, and from that moment on, my feet were inexorably on the path to the Sacred Cave. I thought once it had me in its clutches, I would die. But no. That was too easy. It gave me a choice. The cave would either kill me, or it would kill my love.”
Storm of Shadows Page 29
