American Quest (22 page)

She grazed her knuckle to his lips. “Do not try to speak, my love; it pains you so.”

Rafe wheezed, eyes glazing. “He knows not of your involvement, Isolde. I told him that I had dispatched you to the forest to conjure false signs and that you had no knowledge of my failure.”

Isolde’s eyes traveled down the length of him and she saw burns lining his body. Enervata had exacted his wrath before throwing him to the canteshrikes. And how those beasts must have delighted in turning on Rafe, who stood at Enervata’s right hand, who had never fully adopted the canteshrike ways. How they must have despised him.

As she had despised him.

But no, her spite did not resemble theirs. Isolde’s hatred for him harbored an impurity: love. An otherwise solid carbon stone made brittle by the diamond at its core. That terrible love for Rafe had defined her for centuries and brought her naught but the greatest anguish.

“Isolde, my love, dispatch me.”

Rage flooded her eyes. No, not rage.

“Rafe, do not ask me that! My hated love, you know I can’t!”

To think an hour ago she might have been murdered at Enervata’s feet and spared all this! To have escaped! The only abomination worse than her existence now would be to continue without Rafe.

Sobs wracked her body. She bent her face to his hair and rocked, breathing in his blood and sweat and the appalling odor of burned skin. But beneath all she found a thin, exquisite scent that belonged only to Rafe. A scent she would lose forever.

How long would Enervata force her to continue?

She felt his fingers at her ribs. And when she looked, she saw they grasped at the dagger. It seemed he could barely speak now, so torn was he, and yet still denied the freedom of death. Under the spell of immortality, Rafe could perish only at the sting of Enervata’s dagger.

“No!” she moaned, stroking his hair. “I cannot let you go. Rafe, please don’t ask me so!”

How he suffered, she knew. Each breath extracting tremendous pain. It seemed not a single bone existed in him that had not been crushed; not a span of skin that had not been burned or torn.

If only the spell allowed her to use the dagger upon herself. She would have dispatched her misery long ago. This Enervata had foreseen, even before Isolde realized the hell of her immortality, and he had decreed that the dagger could only find purchase in the hands of another.

“Isolde.”

His words so faint, she felt them in her heart more brightly even than she heard them.

“Isolde, my sweet, transport me to a foreign place, where at your hands I might feel safe.”

Her jaw seized. She threw back her head and shrieked, a roaring hiss that bore no sound but for the rush of poison air that escaped from her lungs.

She gripped the hilt and tore the dagger up into the air.

She wanted to cast it away, into the pool, anywhere. That scream she could not vocalize wracked her broken body.

She plunged the blade into his heart.

Gloria found another book like the one Sileny had brought her, with tales of the Ketox coyotes. She read a parable about an old woman in the desert whose husband died and the only thing left alive to keep her company was her little calico cat.

As the story unfolded, she befriended a coyote from the Ketox pack. She left food out for him and he sang to her at night. But the old woman in the tale was poor and one day she ran out of food. Instead, the coyote took her calico cat. He carried it out into the desert and ate it.

When she read this, Gloria felt a strange sickness creeping over her. It burned at her nerves, and in its wake, left her senses numb. She wanted to look away, didn’t want to finish reading the parable. But once begun, she always felt compelled to finish reading a story. She turned to the final passage.

The old woman wailed with grief. When the Ketox coyote returned, she besought of him contrition. “I have fed and loved you. How could you devour that which I have loved?”

The coyote only heckled her. “Why do you seek my repentance? It will not restore your pet to you.”

“Do you know no love for me?” the old woman moaned.

“I know only the extent of that which one such as myself can know.” And then, belly full, the coyote sang to her, a sweet keening enterprise.

Gloria snapped the book closed.

Enough of that!

She would not waste a single other moment on tales of loneliness or loss. There were so many books here. There was no reason to read anything upsetting. She ran her fingers instead, along the spines of the other books and lost herself in the decadence of the library.

The ironic aspect of her captivity was that not only did she have plenty of time to catch up on her reading, but she even had time to go back and revisit some of her old favorites. Interestingly enough, Vance’s library was fortified with both.

And when he returned that evening with another book in hand, Gloria lingered without bothering to retreat to her room.

He added the new volume to the shelves.

“I see you’re reading again,” he said. “Well, we must be sure to keep you in fresh supply. Do let Sileny know if there’s any book you want.”

“It’s hard to think of any that I can’t already find on these shelves.”

She eyed the spine of Vance’s new book. “Hugo Martin? I’m a fan of his.”

“Are you?” Vance removed his coat and disappeared to the kitchen.

She peeked inside the Hugo Martin title and realized it had been released that day. She skimmed the pages and found herself absorbed immediately.

The scent of sweet onions caramelizing drifted in. Vance reappeared and handed her a glass of wine.

“You’ve read his other works, then, I take it.”

Eyes still on the pages, she sipped absently. “Mmm.”

“This latest one promises to offer a keen focus on group theory.”

“Oh? He touched on that a little in the last one.” Gloria followed Vance into the kitchen, where he assembled a simple onion tart and put a sear to a marinated pork loin. He’d rolled his sleeves to just below his elbows, and was deftly chopping roasted vegetables for a salad.

She slid into the pages again, and when she glanced up from them, she caught his bemused gaze. She colored slightly and took another sip
of wine. “Anyway, in his last book he’d talked about the influence of things like religion, community, state. Oh, and education, of course.”

Vance nodded. “In this one he supposedly takes a closer look at the community factor in change theory. With an emphasis on corporate community.”

“Oh! I’ve studied this extensively. I’m so glad Martin’s taking it on. You know, people are so quick to judge with corporations. They want to think of them as evil empires. But honestly, corporations are just made up of individual people. All the same change theory principles apply. You have to start with the individual and let that individual find matching ideas among the community.”

Vance regarded her with a sidelong glance. “True. One must instigate the proper motivation, followed by a systematic method of employing the change. Of course this is best managed with the support of other factions, such as state and educational systems.”

She smiled. “Yes. And corporations can have a positive impact on society. A bigger impact than individuals.”

His soot-colored eyes drifted. “It’s a powerful thing, to be able to impact society. You challenge me with your observations. I’ve always wanted to test some of the principles of change theory in a controlled environment. I’ve often thought of how it might be done on a smaller scale.”

Gloria let her imagination dance over the possibilities. With Vance’s resources, he certainly could test out those principles. And the way his mind hungered for exploration made her think of what she imagined Bruce to be like several years from now. Bright and innovative but with sharper, more developed objectives.

Bruce.

Suddenly she felt suffocating pain. The image she’d seen of Bruce, what she knew about him moving on to a life without her. She couldn’t bear to think about it.

She looked up at Vance. He seemed so hungry for her company. It felt easy to lose herself in conversation with him. To explore the electricity of his mind.

But a tide of sadness already coursed through her. She set her wine glass on the counter. “Excuse me. I—I think I need to spend the rest of the evening in my room.”

Vance’s gaze snapped up from the stove. “Did I say something to upset you?”

Gloria backed away. “It isn’t that.”

“Then have dinner with me.”

“Are you going to force me to have dinner with you, in the same way you’ve forced me to stay here as your prisoner?”

His face showed surprise. “Of course you’re free to join me only if you wish.”

Gloria’s heart thundered. “This entire situation is wrong, Aaron. It’s just so wrong, and you know it!”

She left him alone in the kitchen and fled to her room, closing the door behind her.

Bruce turned toward the backseat. “What do you think, guys? You wanna hit that diner?”

“Nothing could be finer!” Shannon chortled. “I love a good greasy spoon, especially if they serve biscuits and gravy. That’ll throw an extra wobble on these hips!”

Forte gave her a wicked grin. “I’ll wobble your hips, baby!”

“Eek!” Jamie said, flipping her blinker. “You’re freaking me out back there.”

She pulled the van up to a stop sign. There were no cars behind them and none in traffic. But Jamie did not advance. The blinker tapped out a turn-to-the-right, but her gaze seemed fixed to the left.

Bruce followed her eyes. Just beyond the intersection stood a restaurant. Not a diner, an Italian joint. And spaced along the facade, four columns ran upward to a hip in the roof.

Shannon looked around. “Hey, why aren’t we moving? Oh, wow! I think we may have just found our Four Pillars of Humanity Quickstop.”

Jamie switched the blinker and turned left to the restaurant. They
piled out of the van and went inside. It was nearly empty. A middleaged waitress, an Italian woman with a sad smile to her eyes, greeted them and told them to sit anywhere.

They assembled at a booth and the waitress passed menus around. Her nametag read Bedelia.

“Something to drink, kids?”

“Some water, please.” Bruce said.

“Sure, honey.”

She nodded, and she even smiled a bit, but there seemed a heaviness about her. A vacuum that gave her the look of an observer who saw life through a two-way mirror. Bruce suddenly wished he could think of something to cheer her up, something that would turn her smile into a true fact instead of a fake fact.

She turned her back and walked toward the kitchen.

Shannon cocked her brow. “Whaddaya think? Suppose old Bedelia is trying to concentrate on how to deprive power from depraved Pravus hordes?”

Bruce watched the waitress disappear into the back, her apron cinched at her waist in a generous bow.

Mama bear.

He thought of the night he and Gloria talked to Carlotta, when she’d explained how to get the escarole just right. A lump formed in his throat.

“Excuse me; I’ll be back in just a sec.”

He went to the men’s room and then took his time making his way back to the table. He stole a look into the kitchen and into a utility room. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

As he approached the booth, he saw that Bedelia was standing in front of the table with shoulders shaking and a tear on her cheek. He slowed his steps. He’d caught that sad look in her eye when they first walked in and wondered how that might have escalated to full-on tears in the time it took him to go to the bathroom. But then he noticed everyone else at the table was rocking with laughter and that Bedelia’s tear was from laughing as well.

He slid into the booth next to Jamie.

Shannon’s hands were waving about her head. “I took the rollers out and looked in the mirror, and I’m like, I don’t know, a Chia Pet or something. So I’m thinking that’s cool. You know. I’ll rinse it out and
maybe it’ll calm down. So I do that and it didn’t, and then when I brushed it I noticed all this hair in my hairbrush. It was falling out. Like, a third of my hair. Breaking off where the hairbrush hit it. But the hair that remained was still standing on end, not even curly, but kind scary-jaggedy looking. So now I’ve gone from Chia Pet to looking like a milkweed.”