CHAPTER SEVEN
A figure elbowed their way from a back room to the bar, and her heart flutter-stopped in a rushing, searing moment of realization.
“Ah,” the old man said, nodding in her direction. “So you made it.” He heaved a bin of potatoes onto the bar and wiped the back of his large hand across his forehead. “We’re opening shortly, so if you can just grab a peeler…”
Aika did not ease her stance, or lower her gun. “What the hell is this?”
He wiped his hands on a towel. “Several pounds of potatoes that won’t peel themselves, girl.”
Aika shook her head. “This bar doesn’t belong here.”
He blinked at her. “Where else would it be?”
“On the other side of town, for a start.”
He grunted and came out from behind the bar to face her. “This bar is exactly where it needs to be—which is, I might say, the entire point.” He raised a bushy eyebrow. “That first day you found me where we were needed. Today, we’re needed here.”
Aika lowered her weapon fractionally. “This is more of that business with the sword, isn’t it? And that place you took me.”
“So you do have a brain between your ears. That’s good news.” He picked up a TV remote from the bar. “I’ll leave the rest of your questions to be answered by someone you trust, shall I?” And with that, he powered on the telly mounted in a corner behind the bar.
A long moment of static, and then…Jamie.
His deep, deep blue eyes riveted her to the spot. She couldn’t have been more shocked had he materialized before her, alive and whole.
“Aika. I can only hope this reaches you in time. Whatever you do, don’t come to London.” He drew a deep, rattling breath. “It wasn’t me they wanted. It was you.”
Minutes, or an eternity, later. A resounding report pounding in her hands, her arms, her body, followed by glass shattering. On her hands and knees, dry heaving.
A warm shadow blocking out the light.
She pushed the old man away. “Wait. Just wait.” She unzipped her flak jacket, clawed apart the collar of her shirt. “I need to think.”
He ignored her protests. “Come with me.” His meaty hand clamped down on her elbow, lifting her to her feet. He carried her, too limp to fight him off, into the back room.
Next thing she knew, her hands were gripping a rough stone rim around a glowing hot, molten core searing from the depths of the earth itself. Her eyes started to water, but her mind began to clear. She closed her eyes in blessed silence.
Think.
How was it possible?
Aika forced her skittering mind’s eye to the video, to the date and time stamp in the lower right corner. She searched her memory, trying to find where she’d seen that stamp before.
She remembered riding the train to London, viewing Jamie’s pictures on her phone. The Millennium Eye at night, St. Paul’s Cathedral in a bank of fog…and the half-constructed pyramid of Dreamtech in Hyde Park. She remembered the old man, sitting across the aisle from her.
She turned on him, a wash of cool air sweeping over her face after the furnace blast of the fire pit. “You let him die?”
He shook his head. “By then it was already too late, and you were on your way. We watched over you.” He took her by the shoulders. “Think, girl. Who else had his pictures?”
A government bigwig. Government…or contractor?
Dreamtech?
The lights flickered and shut off for a moment, stage lights warning of impending curtain time. “They’re coming,” he said.
“They can’t be. They’re not supposed to come until I complete our objective.”
The old man snatched her hand comp from her pocket. “Sure about that?” he snarled.
They turned as a figure barreled into the back room. Aika took a step back. “Padre?
Bobby shook his thinning blond head. “No time to explain. They’re here.”
“They followed her here,” the old man told him.
Before she could react he dropped the hand comp into the fire. Her ear piece whined and died with an abrupt crackle and pop. She ripped it away. “I have to get out there and stop them. How are you doing it?”
The old man frowned. “Doing what?”
“Blocking Dreamtech’s signal for the biosphere?”
“What in Brighid’s sweet name are you talking about?”
The lights flickered again. “There’s no time,” Bobby said. “It’ll have to be now.”
The old man grabbed Aika by the shoulders. “Remember.”
“Remember what?”
“What you are.” He tapped her forehand with the tips of his fingers, probably harder than was strictly necessary.
She staggered back, into total darkness.
The dark was no mere absence of light. It was simply…absence, and she knew he’d sent her back to that place. How had the old man put it? The place between space and time. Only this time, she couldn’t sense a way back.
“You came.”
Aika spun around in the fathomless empty.
A woman stood, dressed in an old, shimmering gown that changed from blue to green and back again like a snake’s skin. Her hair, of indeterminate color somewhere between golden blond and russet red, curled almost to her ankles. She clasped a sword in her hands, held below her breasts in the fashion of a knight’s elegy.
Aika remained where she was. “Who are you?”
“I am Brighid. And you, my dear, are of my blood.” She cocked her head. “Do you not remember?”
“Remember? I’ve never—”
She stopped. Because suddenly she did remember. The woman—Brighid—cocked her head, eyes sparkling as though she were responsible for the unbidden memory flashing to the surface.
It was true Aika’s mother had been something of an on-again, off-again Wiccan. She had also been a social worker, with endless depths of compassion and an unwavering need to save people. When alive Siobhan Lafferty né Lareto had filled her home with laughter and love and a motley assortment of characters. Her funeral had been no different.
Aika had been ten. Jamie, having been one of her mother’s cases, less than a year younger. In the milling crowds waiting patiently to pay their respects to her heart broken father while they celebrated Siobhan’s life was a woman, looking slightly out of place even in this gathering. She’d worn an old, flowing gown and a sad smile, and Aika remembered thinking she was a faerie princess. This theory had been borne out by the woman disappearing between one breath and the next.
Now she knew—not a faerie princess, but close. Or, perhaps the original. Brighid.
“What do you people want with me?” Aika demanded, clenching her hands to stop their trembling, wishing she could do the same with her voice. “I’m not anything special. All I’m trying to do is survive.”
“My sweet child. Haven’t you guessed?” Brighid’s eyes shone incandescent in the absolute black. “You’re immortal. And you will live a very long time.”
“No.” Aika felt an unbreakable need to sit. Her knees went, a slow collapse she had no unconscious awareness of. “I’m not what you want me to be. I can’t. I’m…”
“What? Human?” Brighid approached, sank with ancient grace to her level. “You are, you know. You just happen to be more, as well. You can be more, if you choose to.”
Aika took a shaky breath. “Why would I want this?”
Brighid lay the sword between them, and asked her a question in return. “Why do you do it, Aikaterina? The militia, Dreamtech?”
The air left her lungs in rush, forcing a smile to her lips. “He used to call me that.”
“James.”
“Yes.” Aika studied her distorted reflection in the sword’s blade. “I suppose I do it for him, because he can’t anymore.” A question formed, bubbled to the surface. “Was my mother like me?”
“One of us? Yes. But she was never needed, not like you. This time, this place…” Brighid’s eyes drifted shut. “It’s a
ll happening so fast. You’re here, Aika, because one who came before you can no longer perform her duties. When one Keeper of the Flame has been lost, another ascends to take her place.”
“Lost? What happened to ‘immortal’?”
“You are a champion and very, very difficult to kill. If you die on the mortal plane, your soul returns to the source of my Flame, the Tír na Nog, until the End of Days bids you fight once more in one of the fifty-four contingents. Once you ascend, you will grow no older in your body, though your soul will grow in wisdom as the decades and centuries pass.” Brighid made a sweeping gesture over the sword. “This is your link to us, to what you need to know. If you fight to the best of your ability for those that cannot, you can access untold power to succeed. But your greatest power lies in your ability to sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?”
“To risk your life to save another’s—there is no greater power. And as a Keeper of the Flame, you can harness it.”
Brighid got to her feet, stepping away to leave Aika with the sword. “The choice is yours, my child. But know this: they need you, more than we do, more than your need to be human. To survive.”
Aika drew her knees up, wrapping in her arms around them in a futile effort to ward off the cold generated by the vast empty surrounding her. “How long do I have?”
“To decide? Take as long as you need, child. There is no time here.” And with a soft, felt whisper Brighid was gone.
Aika rested her chin on her crossed arms, staring at herself in the sword’s blade. She looked pale enough to be a corpse, her face made off kilter by its deep fuller.
Could she do it? Sacrifice everything to…what had Brighid called it? Ascend? Become…Other?
But then she wondered what she had to lose. She and Jamie had been inseparable as children, and as their adult relationship evolved they’d been in lockstep, giving up time now so they might have forever later. They’d both worked so hard—Jamie on his photography, she two and sometimes even three jobs at a time to support them. And now?
She was already alone. Could she endure the possibility of an eternity of lonely purpose followed by an apocalypse? Or would she spend that eternity resenting the lack of what could have been?
Jamie would have done it. Somehow he had inherited her mother’s need to save the world where Aika only wanted a simple, happy life making sure he ate and slept while he did the saving. It’d been the only thing she’d been good at, really—taking care of her Jamie.
It occurred to her that maybe—just maybe—she might still be able to take care of him in some fashion, if she picked up the burden he was no longer able to carry.
She stared at the sword a little while longer, coming to a decision. Then she reached forward, and wrapped her hand around its leather-bound grip.
A soundless implosion of light and heat threw her back with the force of a bomb’s blast. She blacked out before she hit the ground.
CHAPTER EIGHT