Ellida (19 page)

“And?”

Ahmed’s eyes found Astrid’s. “I can’t explain
why, but the moment I crossed the border, I felt as if I’d come
home.”

“Oh, I’m so glad! I missed you, more than
anyone else from Rosenthal. I cried my eyes out the morning I left.
And then Jack told me about you. I was surprised. I didn’t know you
were a werewolf, like me.”

“Jack contacted me soon after you left
Rosenthal,” Ahmed continued. “He asked me to go to Scotland with
him and James to the meeting with Darius.”

Astrid was surprised. “You went with them?
Why didn’t Jack tell me anything?”

“I asked him not to. At that point, I hadn’t
decided yet if I wanted to come here or not. And then James told me
about this job and urged me to apply for it, and here I am.”

“We’ll work together again,” Astrid said.
“Tell me something else. How did you manage to look so different
back in Rosenthal? You were much older, overweight, your hair was
grey and thin, even your voice and movement were different.
Everything except your hands.”

“My great-great-great grandfather was a
shihirbas
, a wizard. He was a great healer. I inherited some
of his skills. I’ve been a
hekim
of one kind or another
since 1612. I was also a
yüzbaşi
in the Ottoman Army.”

“A doctor and a captain. An army physician,
in other words.”

“I was gravely wounded in 1621, and left to
die on the field after the Battle of Khotyn. I woke up as a
werewolf. I’ve never known who turned me. Soon I discovered I could
change my human appearance. You know that some werewolves can do
that, don’t you?”

Astrid nodded. “A useful ability when you
live among the general human population.”

“Yes. That’s the reason, I believe, we have
it. I can make myself look younger or older, change my facial
features, my eyes or my hair. Everything but my hands. It’s helped
me to live more or less unnoticed since then. What about you? Jack
says you can take an animal shape in your human form, as well as
change your werewolf appearance, but that’s a wizard skill, right?
He told me what you did when those Tel-Urughs attacked you, you
made yourself look exactly like him. I can’t modify my appearance
once I turn into a wolf.”

“It’s a different set of skills. It’s about
creating an illusion. I make you believe I’m a snake, for example,
or a lion, or a bird, but I don’t change physically. And yes, I can
do it while in my wolf form. But if you touch me—pooff!—your mind
breaches the illusion and I’m back. You, on the other hand,
physically modify your look and you can hold it for quite a while.
The illusion I create lasts no more than a few minutes in any
case.”

“With practice, you’ll master the skill.
Normally, Ellidas are able to hold it for longer. Some can even
make others look different. Morgaine’s particularly good at
it.”

“Oh, I’m sure she won’t let me skip this
lesson. And maybe you should try. You’re part wizard, you probably
have it as a latent faculty… Ahmed, are you done for today?”

“Pretty much. I came here to sign the
paperwork.”

“Where are you staying?”

“At The Watchman’s. Your uncle offered to
have me stay with them until I find a permanent place. But you all
have enough disruption with renovations and everything.”

“Jack’s house is under renovations, not
James’. The Watchman’s is half an hour from here. You can stay in
my house. It’s also under renovation, but there are several still
habitable rooms. What do you think? There will be noise during the
day, but you’ll be working anyway. And you’ll have your
privacy.”

Ahmed laughed. “I need it far less than I
used to. I’ve been alone enough.”

“Then we have a deal. You’re staying in my
house until you find a place for yourself. I even know who can help
you with that.”

Astrid pulled out her phone and called
Peyton. “Hey, can you come to Jack’s place for lunch? I ran into an
old friend here at the Clinic, Dr. Demmir, my colleague from
Rosenthal. And he also happens to be looking for a house.”

When she finished, Astrid turned to Ahmed.
“Peyton’s my friend. She works for Millennium Property, that’s the
Mohegan-Canagan real estate company. She’ll find you something in
no time. Let’s go to the hotel to pick up your stuff and then we
can go somewhere for coffee.”

“Maybe Jack and James wouldn’t mind an extra
pair of hands.”

LATER THAT evening, Astrid showed Ahmed his
new temporary place and tossed him the spare set of keys. She was
at the door when Ahmed stopped her. “I need to talk to you. Do you
have a minute?”

Astrid nodded. They sat on the sofa in the
living room.

“I rarely speak about myself, Astrid,” Ahmed
started. “There are few people who know anything about my life,
except for the last several decades, and that’s mostly about my job
and career. Livia Blake’s one of them. I’m a part wizard, and you
know that it isn’t easy to mess with our minds, unless we are
unconscious or we allow somebody in. Livia wanted to be sure I was
no threat for you. She asked me for permission to enter my mind,
and I agreed. Once she’s in, you can’t hide anything from her. What
she saw she kept to herself, satisfied that I’m a friend, not a
foe.”

Astrid listened without interrupting.

“Jack also knows a great deal about me,”
Ahmed continued. “When he asked me about my life, I could’ve told
him to go to hell, which I usually did whenever somebody came too
close. We sat in my office in Rosenthal one evening, and I told him
willingly everything Livia had seen in my head out of necessity. It
was a weird feeling to speak to a complete stranger about things
that I’d tried to guard all my life. Yet that was what I did. It
was a cathartic experience. It helped me to finally leave the past
where it belonged. It didn’t happen so suddenly, of course. I’d
been ready to turn over a new leaf for some time, even before I
came to Rosenthal, but I didn’t know how. I let time show me.

“See, Astrid, when you came to Rosenthal with
your Tel-Urugh friends, suddenly the entire world that I’d been
trying to ignore for centuries was all around me… Do you have black
tea here, by chance?” he asked.

Astrid smiled. “Maybe some leftovers from
twenty-five years ago. I’ll go across the street. Betty will have
some.”

Ahmed stopped her. “No, don’t. I have some
somewhere in one of my bags.”

Ten minutes later, he came back from the
kitchen with two mugs of fragrant cardamom black tea. For a long
moment, Ahmed was lost in his thoughts. Astrid watched his strong,
elegant hands gripped around the cup. She’d looked at those same
hands many times before working with delicate medical equipment.
She would always recognize them, no matter how their owner had
changed.

“For reasons I still can’t grasp, or explain,
the moment I saw you I knew that somehow your life and mine would
cross, and not on one level only,” Ahmed said. “Don’t get me wrong,
Astrid. You’re a gorgeous young woman, but there’s nothing carnal
in the connection I feel between you and me. I don’t know what it
is. I only know that you’re somehow important to me. Your arrival
in Rosenthal put my entire life into perspective. We’ll see.”

“I always felt connected to you, Ahmed. I
also don’t know why.”

“I talked to Jack about it. He thinks it’s
because you’re Ellida. Your mandate is to bring balance and
harmony, but there’s more than that, I’m sure. And that’s why I’ll
tell you about myself.”

His father, Yusuf-Bey, Ahmed said, had been a
high-ranked Ottoman administrator, whose ancestors were granted
land property in Hungary after the Battle of Mohacs in 1521.
Yusuf-Bey lived between his wealthy
beylik
—land estate—in
Hungary and his homeland in Konya, in Anatolia. Ahmed was the only
child. His father wanted him to study law, but nonetheless
supported his son’s decision to become a doctor. Ahmed was sent to
the best schools in Istanbul, Izmir and Cairo. To his father’s
dismay, he joined the army and became a military physician. His
bravery soon earned him a captain’s rank.

Ahmed was a month shy of thirty-one when his
unit was sent to Khotyn. For more than a month, from the beginning
of September until the first autumn snow in early October, the
Polish-Lithuanian forces had been halting Sultan Osman the Second’s
army advances. Having sustained heavy losses in several attacks on
fortified Polish lines, the Ottomans had abandoned their siege, the
Lithuanian commander died on the battlefield, and the Battle of
Khotyn ended in a stalemate.

“I was wounded on September 24, a day after
my birthday. The last thing I remembered was the sky, blue and
cloudless, and silence. Before I fell, I fought with three Polish
soldiers. I brought down two, but the third one slashed me across
the abdomen. It was a mortal wound. I still remember him: he was a
big man, blond, with pale blue eyes. He raised his sword to finish
me off, but then changed his mind. Did he take pity on me, or did
he realize I wouldn’t make it anyway? Maybe he thought I could make
it, I’ll never know. He left me barely alive. My last thoughts were
about Mariam, my beautiful young wife. And the child she carried. I
remember staring into that blue, clear sky, unbearably sad because
I knew I wouldn’t see them again. I closed my eyes and died.”

The rain had started that night and woke him
up, Ahmed continued after a while. He didn’t feel pain. He could
move his legs and his hands. Although his whole body felt weird,
oversized, out of proportion, out of shape, it was connected to its
surroundings, warm and bursting with life. “Even now I can’t
describe my horror when I realized that my body belonged to a big
kurt
, a wolf… I learned to live with who I am long ago, but
at that moment, it was something my mind couldn’t grasp. But
beneath the terror, I was mad with happiness to be alive. Covered
with the darkness, I dragged myself from the battlefield and stayed
in wolf form long enough for my wounds to heal completely. Somehow,
I knew from the very beginning how to change forms at will. And I
wanted to go home. On my long journey I prayed to God to find my
family alive and well; I kept imagining my wife, smiling, with a
big bump. She was six months pregnant when I left.”

Ahmed ran his hand across his eyes, lost for
a moment in his memories. Astrid waited, afraid to say a word,
afraid to touch him. After so many centuries, the pain was still
there.

“When I finally returned home, I found my
parents dead. They’d died of a plague that struck Konya a month
before. It was a local epidemic and it didn’t last long. Mariam was
also dying. I came in time to try to save maybe her, maybe the
child, maybe both, but she refused. I’m not sure she even
understood what I was telling her. Wolves have always been an
important part of the folklore and mythology of Anatolia. I hoped
she would allow me to turn her, although I wasn’t sure how I would
do that. I still didn’t know anything about being a werewolf. But
Mariam was from a different part of the Empire, she was a Greek,
from Rhodes. She was looking at me with such utmost horror and just
kept saying no, no, no… To do something like that, to turn her into
a wolf would be much worse than death for her. And she must have
thought I’d lost my mind. The next day, she was dead, and my son
with her.”

Astrid’s hand touched Ahmed’s forearm and
squeezed it gently.

“I’m so sorry, Ahmed.”

He smiled weakly. “It was almost four hundred
years ago, Astrid. It’s a part of me, and it’s always going to be,
and it still hurts sometimes, but I did come to peace with my past.
Anyway, to keep a long story short, I left Anatolia and started
traveling: Western Europe, the Russian Empire, the Middle East. I
continued working as a doctor. I healed humans, but also
werewolves, especially children. I studied wherever I had the
opportunity, at Oxford, at Al Azhar, at University of Milan, Padua,
Prague… Different subjects—history, art, engineering, and of
course, medicine.

“From time to time there was a woman in my
life, but mostly I was alone. Sometimes I lived close to a werewolf
clan, but was never a part of its structure. I was turned, and I
felt I didn’t belong to any clan. Eventually I came to America,
after the Second World War. I studied medicine at Berkley and later
at Harvard. My father was so rich that even after all those
centuries I’ve barely scratched the surface of that wealth.” He
smiled. “Although I’m not bad myself at making money when I put a
bit of effort into it.”

“No wonder Dr. Falkenstein told me he’d hired
a more experienced doctor,” Astrid said. “It’s impossible to
compete with you. I knew you were special right after the first
surgery we did together.”

Ahmed’s hand reached out and lifted her chin.
“You’re the best of the best, Astrid. Tristan valued you above
anyone else. By the way, where are they? The Blakes?”

“In Seattle.” Astrid laughed. “You should
thank Tristan for your job. He sent your predecessor to
California.”

“Ah, that’s how it works. Brilliant! Jack
told me they are coming here, to be close to you.”

Astrid confirmed it with a quick nod of her
head. “My grandparents are coming soon, too. And Ingmar, my close
friend.”

“And Ellida Morgain’s husband, I’ve
heard.”

“Jack and James are raising an army, Ahmed,”
Astrid said quietly. “There’s going to be a war.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here. And we’ll be
ready. Only a little bit of fear keeps Seth in power. Once Darius
returns, it’s going to be over soon.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Darius Withali is a good man. And very
capable. He doesn’t want to be an Einhamir, though. He’s terrified
he would become like Seth one day.”

“Did Jack tell you why it’s not
possible?”

“He did. It’s unfair Darius doesn’t know that
Seth’s isn’t his father. Morgaine insists on keeping it secret for
the time being. She must have a good reason for that.”