by Callie Stone
“I am just fine,” I said, picking up a bottle of Peroni from the foam cooler on the floor and pretending to study the label. “Or at least, I will be.”
Hask and I looked at each expectantly, waiting for the other to elaborate.
He was quicker on the draw.
“I hear your cooking is quite marvellous indeed, Troy.”
Both Alexander and myself instantly looked over at Natasha who was looking straight down at the plate of gnocchi on her lap as if she were ashamed of something. She had clearly complimented my cooking while speaking to Hask about our team’s life at the flat. Why Alexander looked at Natasha, then actually looked over at me, as if he were mildly upset about something, I could never guess.
“Uh, let us discuss your next mission,” Hask announced, looking displeased with the weird little moment he had inadvertently created.
It was an odd enough scene already, with all of us eating decent local food from paper plates in Hask’s office.
There were surely reasons Director Hask had for wanting to avoid the commissary.
“What’s next, boss?” Michael asked with his mouth full of what must have been the finest carbonara he had ever had.
“You will be heading to the portal in Madrid. We believe it may be around one of the metro stations on one of the lines there.”
“That narrows it down.” Michael punctuated his comment with a swig of beer. For once, I agreed with the sentiment of his jesting.
“Why Madrid?” I asked.
“Been some curious activity in the area,” Hask answered. “More than normal, even for hell’s heartbeat.”
This got Alexander’s attention.
“What’s that mean?” he asked point blank.
Hask gave him a look we all recognised, it was a look that said Alexander was chasing an unproductive line of questioning.
“It means, whoever is using the portal has been coming and going with more frequency than usual.”
“More than that Book of Revelations recreation we saw being played out last night?” I asked.
“You will soon be on your way there to find out. Now off you go, you have got a long journey from Roma Tiburtina ahead of you.”
We thanked Hask and vacated his office, I looked back as the door shut.
He was already swivelling in his chair to stare at the giant monitor on his wall that displayed colourful maps of the world with various locations highlighted in red and green.
Our driver was not Mrs. Beatrice that time, but someone who I had guessed Hask had hired just for transportation purposes. The youngish, perpetually silent man, not only did he take us to the station but he accompanied us all the way to the platform with heavy footed steps. The last stirrings of dusk were still present outside, and what seemed to be our train was starting to pull slowly up to the platform.
Alexander gave our heavy bags a shove with his foot to position them closer to where it seemed like the door to the sleeper car would end up on the platform.
It was only when the train came to a full stop that I realised there were about twenty people or so waiting for us on board.
It was a quiet, somber boarding, for both my team and the scattered other travellers.
From what I had gathered there was still an air of mystery surrounding the happenings at the colosseum that morning, but there must have been an overall sense of dread in the air inspired by the news coming in from all over Europe.
By the time we had started moving, it served as though Natasha, Kieran, and Michael had all retreated to their private cabins.
A few of the other passengers immediately took refuge in the next car over—which was the dining car, at least appeared to be from the few brief glimpses I saw from the doorway opening and closing.
What no one seemed to elect to do was sit in the small, open array of seats in what appeared to be a lounge section of sorts, just past the sleeping compartments.
So, naturally, I chose to spend some time there.
I sat alone quietly in my seat by the window, watching as we passed through the night time cityscape outside.
“She must really enjoy your cooking.”
Sure, I was able to stop myself from jumping at the sound of Alexander’s voice, but it had startled me enough that I came close.
“What? Are you still thinking about Hask’s innocuous little comment?” I asked Alexander defensively before glancing in his direction just long enough to see him almost glaring at me from a seat across the aisle.
I turned my attention away from the view outside of the train window, a view with which I had been thoroughly engrossed, to face Alexander, understanding that he wished to have a conversation.
“It seems as though you’re the only one she chooses to talk to about to others.” Alexander looked to be close to seething by that point. If I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed that his feelings were so hurt that he was just sharing them unfiltered.
“Alexander, I know that you cannot be this petty about things.”
“Petty? You really have a way with words, don’t you? Honestly, I am not being petty. I am just stating facts and drawing conclusions from them. Facts and conclusions that apparently you are too thick skulled to make yourself.”
He looked hurt. He looked, and again this was something I would have liked to think beneath him, but he looked jealous.
Yet if he were jealous indeed, I knew accusing him of such was not going to help matters in any immediate way, so the best I could do is try to find some common ground.
“She really is something special, is she not?” I began.
Alexander simply had to agree with that, I figured.
“Yes, she is. I care about her a great deal. And, what I cannot hide, even from you, especially from you, Troy, is that I care not only about her but for her. I care for her very much.”
That caught me off guard, and yet it didn’t. I knew he cared for her in some way that was different than me, but I did not expect him to admit to it like this. Not to me, at least.
And not in such a fragile way.
“I know you do.” I tried to reassure him. “You always have.”
“But now someone else does, that she returns those feelings to… it…”
“No, not someone else. Just you. You’re special to her, even if it isn’t in that way.”
I saw a hint of a smile appear on his face as I said that.
“Thank you, Troy,” he said, “I appreciate that.”
I smiled back at him.
“You’re welcome, my friend. After all, we both realise what is most important, it is not your feelings, and it certainly is not mine.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It is Natasha who truly matters. And I would never want to do anything that would jeopardise her safety or her happiness.”
I nodded and the conversation died down again. Being in the presence of Alexander or any of my teammates always had a way of making me slightly more aware of my own situation, my thoughts and motivations, even if the less pleasant and painful facets of these things were the facets I had successfully managed to forget for a while.
“Thank you,” I said to Alexander.
“For what?” he scoffed slightly, but before there tension between us could start rebuilding itself he found his way quickly back to our common ground.
“Natasha is getting some rest, the last I noticed.”
“Yes, I saw her sleeping.”
“She looked very tired, it’s been a rough few days. And I cannot fathom that a blast like that could not have seriously taken it out of her, despite her outward demeanour about it. Like all of us, she will need to be fully alert for Madrid, especially as this is another case in such the exact portal location of a mystery.”
“We will all need to be at full capacity, indeed. Do you know how large Madrid’s transit system is? If the portal is even by the metro as Hask surmised.”
Alexander smiled at me briefly then turned his eyes back to staring out the window. He
didn’t seem to have anything else to say so I let the silence linger for a while.
“You know,” I said, trying to break the silence.
“What?” he asked, turning back to me again.
“We’re going to be together a lot more from now on.”
Finally, I thought, maybe he’d realised that his cold shoulder routine wasn’t going to help him with me or the team, and he’d start being normal. That would have made things so much easier.
“I know,” he said in a flat confirmation that what I said was true. However, he was just starting to signal that he was losing interest, even with this subject which seemed to enthral us both so.
Kieran and Michael were still nowhere to be found, and Natasha was still dead asleep. Even if I could not see her at that very moment, I could somehow just sense her resting in blissful peace in her compartment nearby.
Yet I was wide awake, and so was Alexander, so for a touch more conversation I was going to have to find a different tactic.
“She inspires me,” I said at last. “She may be the bravest one out of all of us.”
“I know,” Alexander repeated. The words were the same as his last reply, but his tone had changed to something softer, something more open, and something much more genuine. “She inspires me, too.”
While the air of the train ride did not have that odd magic of our earlier overnight ride from Paris to Zurich, the Madrid-bound train did take in a peaceful air after Alexander and I aired out tensions—or rather he had aired his tension.
“Hey, where’s Natasha?” I asked, looking around for my slumbering colleague.
“She said she was going back to her room,”Alexander replied. “She looked pretty beat.”
“Yeah, she was,” I agreed. “I don’t know how she does it time and again.”
I got up from my seat and walked over to the hallway that led to the sleeper compartments where Natasha was supposed to be resting.
The train droned on, and I soon found myself standing outside the door to the private room that Natasha had been given. Unlike my own room in the passenger car, hers had a tiny window that looked out onto the darkened rural scene somewhere between northern Italy and southern France. I knocked on the door and waited. No answer. I knocked again, longer this time.
“Why do you wish to wake her?” This latest odyssey with my team had certainly brought with it things with which I was not accustomed. Hearing Alexander use a gentle tone was the most astonishing of those things.
I turned to see him leaning against the frame of the open door to his own room, one hand in his pocket and a faint smile on his lips.
“Hask told us to rest,” I said, knowing that he was fully aware of why I had come. “She’s probably really tired, must be more than any one of us.”
Alexander laughed softly and pushed himself off of his doorway.
“It sounds as if you are explaining why you shouldn’t be waking her.” Of course, Alexander was correct. There was no halfway reasonable excuse I could muster, so I had grabbed at the first reasonable excuse that surfaced in my mind. And Alexander and I were both fully aware of that.
I wanted to turn around and go back to my room, but something about Alexander’s insistence made me stay put. I didn’t want to risk making him mad for some reason.
“Go ahead,” he urged me. “She won’t bite, unless that’s what you want.”
As I lifted my left boot off the ground and readied myself to take a step towards where Alexander stood in the door frame of his sleeper compartment, I could not help but note that the look of mild amusement on his mug had seemed to grow into an even wider self-satisfied simper. Whilst my first instinct was to allow this to infuriate me further, when I had realised the reason for Alexander’s amusement I felt the traces of a smile on my own lips. Even while stepping heavily towards him, I was still moving gently so as to not waken Natasha.
“Very droll, Alexander,” I whispered down to him as I passed him by.
The car was dark, save for the moonlight coming in through the windows, and quietly lit by the lights of the passing stations. Even with the relative brightness of the passing stations, it still took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
The physical dimension to my tiredness hit me like a ten tonne weight as I passed through the open seating section of the train car once more. It was enough that there was no resisting the urge to sit down and give my eyes and body what I figured to be a few minutes, at most, of rest. Even with my own reserved sleeping compartment just a few meters away, it was one of those sudden onslaughts of suppressed fatigue making itself known.
I just had to sit down.
A moment later, my head was laying against the cold glass of the window, and my eyes were closing.
I woke up to the dull blare of the train intercom, and the feeling of Natasha shaking my shoulder to wake me. I turned to her as she dug around in her purse for something.
“What time is it?” I groaned in a voice I barely recognised as my own, my tongue feeling like sandpaper.
She turned to me, a small bottle of painkillers in hand.
“It’s about half past four, you need these,” she said, handing me the bottle.
I sat up and twisted the cap off the medicine, then took two of the pills before washing them down with the bottled water she handed me next.
“Thanks.”
As my eyes and mind focused enough to take in a look of that open section of the train car, I noted that Natasha and I were the only members of my team currently awake. And I knew that because Kieran, Michael, and Alexander were all visibly slumbering in seats across from us. It also appeared that Natasha was the only one who had spent the bulk of the ride in her compartment.
Everyone else, as far as I could tell, had been in the common section at some point. There was not much mystery to it. Natasha was the only member of the team exhausted enough to stave off the anxious insomnia that had driven the rest of us to wander through the train at some point.
Sitting up, I looked to Natasha. She wore a green and blue plaid shirt with blue jeans and hiking boots, with a slim leather belt around her waist. It was a far cry from the garb she had donned in Rome.
“I don’t even think I heard you guys fighting,” Natasha whispered, tilting her head in the direction of Alexander slumbering across the aisle.
“Were you expecting to hear that?” I rubbed my own temples lightly.
Natasha’s warm, glowing smile told me that I was taking her all too seriously, or at the very least too literally.
“I’m glad you’re able to exist in the same room again,” she whispered, her continued smile telling me that was exaggerating for humorous effect.
Letting out a barely audible chuckle, I noticed there was still no hint of early morning light through the windows on either side of the train, despite the reality of us hurtling through central Spain on our way to Madrid in the middle of summer.
“It’s still dark out,” I mentioned to her, feeling a bit like the broken record I had become on the ever-lightless train.
Her eyes flicked upwards as if she were staring through the train car’s ceiling to the world outside.
“There’s no sunlight coming from up there, either.” Natasha and I both looked in the direction of the recently awakened Michael, who was in the midst of his first wisecrack of the day. “Even if you could see through the ceiling.”
The lighthearted barb was met with total silence from both of us, and even the snoring racket that had previously been reverberating from across the room had ceased.
“I should express some gratitude for that.” That time it was Alexander, who just like Michael had awakened and decided to immediately join in on the conversation.
“No rest for the wicked and all that,” Alexander continued, looking in my direction with a joke that did not quite make sense but was clearly an attempt to show some reconciliation between us. Natasha traveled to Alexander and then back to me, the corners of her lips turn
ed just enough to show that was pleased with that development.
“You’re telling me.” And then there was Kieran, the last of our team to awaken, sharing a mild complaint.
“You could have stayed in your compartment,” Michael responded with a laugh.
“We all could have,” Kieran stated, quite correctly, with a yawn. “Also, I suppose we can speak with normal voices now.”
Kieran was naturally still whispering as he noted this.
He was right, as the snoring that had once permeated the whole room had ceased. Strangely enough, our normal speaking voices may have been quieter.
Also stranger was that the moment all of us were awake was followed shortly by the moment in which what little conversation there was between us seemed to cease. Instead of studying the faces of my teammates to deduce what they may have been thinking, I instead focused on my thoughts. As the train blew through some station without stopping, my mind went to thoughts of those responsible for all of these portals, those who had seemed conspicuously absent from our last couple adventures.
“Haven’t heard from our old friends for a while.” Michael broke the silence as the train sped away from the well-lit station and back into the relative darkness.
With that comment, Michael confirmed that his thoughts were the same as mine. Of course, he was referring to no friend of ours, but rather the closest thing our team had to a rival.
“Zavier,” Natasha said with a strange laugh that sounded to be bursting with disgust. “Him and his demon daddy. What’s his name? Kevin?”
“You know it’s Kalgin,” I laughed.
“And that’s what I’m talking about.”
“We haven’t seen them in a while,” she said somewhat defensively. “Maybe they moved on with their lives or something.”
“Well if they did, they were the only ones,” I said, looking out the window to the darkness rushing past.
This dry humour seemed to have been affecting the whole team. Truth be told there were two reported portals left, including the one we were headed to in Madrid, and if Zavier and his high demon priest patriarch, Kalgin, were not somehow skulking around there, we would need to deal with them soon enough.
