Moving Target (27 page)

She could live with cameras or she could live with him.

S
erena didn’t know what time it was when she realized that a phone was ringing at her bedside. She was so tired from throwing the shuttle, switching heddles and bobbins, and beating down the weft that she ached from her feet to the top of her head. She had only meant to lie down for a minute and stretch out the kinks. She had fallen asleep lying across the bed, with her scarf covering her eyes.

And now her stomach was growling.

So was the phone.

Sighing, stretching, shaking out the fatigue, she got up, settled the scarf around her neck, and reached for the phone. The instant her fingers plucked the unit from the charging cradle, she realized she wasn’t at home.

“Er, North residence,” she said.

“Where’s Erik?” asked a brusque male voice.

“Who’s calling, please?” Serena said in her most pleasant receptionist-dragon voice. Not for nothing had she paid her way through the early years of weaving as an office temp.

“S. K. Niall.”

“Oh. His boss.”

“One of them. Are you Serena Charters?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Erik?” Niall asked again.

“I don’t know. I was weaving and when I weave, the world goes away. I’m sure he’s around here somewhere.”

“Try his tower.”

“Tower?”

At the other end of the line, Niall sighed. Obviously Erik had been correct: Serena needed a keeper. “His studio. On the top floor. Where are you now?”

“His bedroom.” When Serena heard her own words, she winced and added hastily, “The guest room looks out on the street and the guy out there was looking in so Erik gave me his room.”

Niall digested that. “Right. Go to the hall, turn right, go through the living room, take the hallway off the kitchen that looks like it leads to a pantry, open the door, climb the stairs, and bang on Erik’s head until he puts down the damned quill or bitty little paintbrush and pays attention to you.”

“What about if I just yell from here for him to pick up the phone?”

“He’ll ignore you the same way he did the phone. When he’s working, he’s impossible.”

“I resemble that remark.”

“I wasn’t going to point it out, but since you did, it’s only polite that I agree.”

Serena snickered and decided she might like Erik’s boss. “Okay, I’m walking out the door and turning right . . .”

She got lost once, but only because Niall hadn’t counted the coat closet as a door on the way to the kitchen. Soon she was climbing a lovely old spiral staircase up to the broad turret room that had looked so odd from the street. The door at the top of the stairs was open. Just inside the threshold, Mr. Picky was asleep on Erik’s discarded jacket. The room itself was radiant with full-spectrum lights.

Erik didn’t even notice her. He was working over a steeply slanted table, having found that sleep just wasn’t possible for him. His mind was too crammed with speculations, images, memories that he couldn’t possibly have, fears that were all too rational, and a hunger for Serena that was like nothing he had ever known in his life.

His eyes blazed with reflected light like yellow gems. In his right hand was a small penknife. In his left was a long, creamy feather.

He didn’t so much as glance at her.

“S. K. Niall wants you,” she said.

Erik grunted, dipped quill into ink, and went back to writing.

“He’s ignoring me,” she said into the phone.

“Bugger. Try again.”

“Erik, S. K. Niall is on the phone for you.”

“Callhimback,” Erik muttered.

“I think he mumbled something about calling you back,” Serena said.

“Is he writing or illuminating?”

“He has a feather in his left hand, does that help?”

“Not if he’s at the top of the page. How far down is he?”

Serena took a few steps and glanced over Erik’s shoulder. “From what I can see, he’s close to the bottom.”

“Is he wearing a shirt?”

She blinked. “Er, yes. Why?”

“Put the phone in his pocket.”

She hesitated, shrugged, and put the hand unit in the pocket on the left side of Erik’s chest. She told herself that her fingers didn’t tingle where they had slid over his shirt and come into contact with the vital heat of his body. Then she rubbed her hand over her scarf and told herself to think about something else.

He kept working as though she didn’t exist.

“Erik?” Niall’s voice rose from the unit held in Erik’s pocket. “Yo, Erik. This is half of your paycheck calling you. Erik? Can you hear me? ERIK!”

Serena stared at the work that so held Erik’s attention. After a few moments she drew in her breath and made a muted sound of appreciation. With every practiced motion of the quill, he replicated a way of writing that was ancient, difficult, and quite beautiful. Most of the letters looked familiar. Only a few of the words were. The rest were in a language that had died out long, long before Erik North had been born.

The sheet itself was nearly full of writing but for two rectangles in the midst of text. Each rectangle had a penciled design that was as intricate as it was ancient, based on a view of man and the universe that existed only in old Celtic manuscripts. Once the designs were filled in with paint and gold, they would be breathtaking.

Then she realized that Erik wasn’t creating text, he was copying it from what looked like a very modern photograph pinned to the right-hand side of the drafting table. Except for the clarity of the copy—the original apparently had faded to almost invisibility—she couldn’t see any difference between the two pieces of calligraphy.

Erik reached the end of the page about the time his caller reached the end of his patience. He laid the quill aside, dusted the vellum with sand, and grabbed the phone.

“Keep your shirt on,” Erik said to Niall. “You know if I stop in the middle of the page it always shows, especially with the calligrapher whose work I’m copying right now.”

“Is Serena still there?” Niall asked.

Erik looked up as though surprised to find her nearby. She was staring at his replicas as though she had never seen anything like them before. Probably she hadn’t. Replicas as exact as his—down to the technique of tanning the vellum, mixing the ink, making his own colors from recipes a thousand years old—such works were as rare as the originals. More rare, actually. There were only a few people working in the world today who had the patience to do illumination and calligraphy exactly as it had been done in the Middle Ages. He was one of them.

The best one.

“Yeah, she’s still here. Why?” Erik said.

“Serena doesn’t know anything about what I’m going to tell you. If you want to keep it that way, pull your head out of your inkwell.”

“It’s out.”

Niall’s grunt said he wasn’t sure. “Tannahill knows about her pages.”

“Am I supposed to be surprised?” Erik asked, yawning. “He knows anything he puts his mind to knowing. Once I saw that gold carpet page, I figured he’d be sniffing around real soon. It’s better than the one hanging in his gold gallery, and he never liked second place.”

Serena listened with only part of her attention. She was staring at various works in progress that Erik had pinned to several drafting boards around the room. The writing was complete on each one. The illuminations were in varying states of completion. Unlike a weaving, where all colors were added as needed, illumination was accomplished in stages, one color at a time.

“Shane is doing more than sniffing around,” Niall said. “He has his ear to the ground.”

“Sounds uncomfortable.”

“Listen, boyo. Shane is hearing things about those pages. Ugly things. Watch your back. Get that gun out of hiding.”

“I—”

“Hate guns,” Niall cut in impatiently. “I know, Fuzzy boy. I’ve heard it all before. And if you start wearing that nine-millimeter, you’ll live to whine about it again. You still have someone parked out front?”

“Yeah. We’re back to Bad Billy. The baby pickup took off a few hours ago.”

“Probably didn’t go farther than the nearest cheap motel.”

“That’s what I thought.” Erik smiled thinly. “The good news is that in Palm Springs, even the cheap motels aren’t cheap. He’ll have to go all the way to Cat City for cheap. If a flare goes up, the cops might beat him back here.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“I’m not counting on anything, most of all on a chunk of metal that can screw up fatally.”

“Every gun jams sooner or later.”

“If you don’t use ’em, they don’t jam.”

“Sod it,” Niall snarled. “You aren’t stupid so don’t act it. The smartest mouth in the world doesn’t have the stopping force of the dumbest gun in the world. Wear that pistol or I’ll tear up your contract right now.”

“Shane really put the wind up your ass.”

From the corner of his eye, Erik saw Serena walk closer to one of the drafting boards. The page on that one was almost finished. Only the gold foil itself remained to be added. A small “book” of extremely fine gold foil strips lay open in the narrow tray at the bottom of the table. The least stirring in the air lifted the corner of a foil strip, setting it to shimmering with light and hidden life.

Erik raked his fingers through hair that was two months away from its last cut and spiky from similar careless combing. “All right. Fine. I’ll sleep with the damned thing.”

“You do that. If I see you without it before I say all clear, the next thing you’ll hear is the sound of your contract being turned into fucking confetti. Got that, Fuzzy boy?”

“Yeahyeahyeah.” Then Erik cursed and said, “I got it.”

He was talking to himself. Niall had already punched out.

Serena didn’t notice. She had discovered a series of before and after photographs. The before ones were ratty, chewed, dirty, with their ink all but illegible and their colors faded to whispers. Only the elemental gleam of gold was untouched by time. The after pages were as luminous as gems, radiant with the color and beauty created by Erik North’s patience and skill.

He was a forger.

A very good one.

And she had walked right into his trap.

E
rik looked at the page on his drafting board waiting to be illuminated. Then he looked at Serena and frowned. She was pale, tight, and watching him with either contempt or anger flattening the line of her mouth. Maybe it was both.

He supposed he could sit here trying to guess what was on her mind, but his younger sisters had taught him that a man has about as much chance of figuring out how he stepped in the shit with a female as he has of getting himself pregnant. He could try ignoring her mood, but his sisters had cured him of that approach, too.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t ever managed to teach him finesse. “What did I do wrong this time?”

Wordlessly Serena gestured in the direction of the before and after shots. The ends of her soft scarf fluttered as though trying to chase her fingers.

He followed the graceful arc of her hand. “So the place is messy. So what? I wasn’t expecting a white glove inspection.”

She gave him a
blow me
glare.

“C’mon, Serena. Spit it out. From the look of your mouth, it can’t taste good.”

“You’re a forger.”

The rush of pure, hot anger that went through Erik at the contempt in her voice shocked him. It was shock that allowed him to keep his temper. Barely.

“Takes one to know one,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I’ve never passed off any of my weavings as old pieces.”

“But I’ll bet you know the techniques of early weavers.”

“Of course. I learned to weave on a back-strap loom just like—”

He talked over her. “And I’ll bet you know which plants produced which dyes in the old days and the difference between wool and goat yarn and—”

“Every weaver who is any good knows—”

“—what tapestries differ from which wall hangings and the techniques weavers in various cultures used at different times in their history.”

She put her fists on her hips and looked down at him—the handsome, arrogant son of a bitch sitting so at ease in the midst of all his forgeries. “Yes,” she said tightly, “I know quite a bit about the history and tradition of various textiles in cultures from Stone Age string weaving to modern silk art kimonos. So what?”

“So if Rarities wanted an estimate on the worth or probable authenticity of a weaving, you could give them one based on your own learning and experience.”

“What’s your point?”

“It takes one to know one.” His voice was soft, cutting. “If you want to know how a piece of ironwork was made, you go to a man who hammers iron for a living and ask him. If you want to know whether the technique of a weaving is in line with the date being claimed for it, you ask a textile specialist. If you want an estimate on anything, you go to someone who knows how that thing was made, when it was made, and from what it was made.”

“There’s a difference between an expert and a forger!”

His smile was as slicing as his tone. “I know. I just didn’t think you did. I’m an expert on illuminated manuscripts, particularly Insular Celtic. I polished my expertise by doing what the old scribes and monks did—I made manuscripts by hand. In the process of teaching myself, I learned how to make a replica. Then I learned I had a gift for it. I love doing it. I’m not bad at it.” He smiled thinly. “Screw modesty. I’m goddamn good. And I always, always, include an anachronism in my work so that anyone who examines it closely will know it’s modern.”

She wanted to believe him. She wanted it so much she was afraid to let herself. Without realizing it, she clenched her hands tightly on her scarf, sinking her nails into her palms. She felt the discomfort only at a distance, and only for a moment. The scarf seemed to thicken under her fingers, blunting the edges of her nails.

“Now,” he added softly, “you tell me why I should trust a struggling artist whose grandmother’s violent murder was never solved, an artist who as a result of that murder inherited some illuminated pages worth—”

“Are you accusing me of—“ she cut in furiously.