Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (23 page)

She picked up the card before I could close my hand. "I know you did not kill him because you wanted to."

I started to interrupt her, but she quieted me with a shake of her head. A glance that said,
If you don't let me say this, it will never be said.

"I know you did it because he asked you to. I know you did it because it was the only way to heal that which had been broken, to repair the damage done."

What is done is done.

The card was Strength. A woman holds open the mouth of a lion, and as I glanced at the card, the faces changed. Me, holding open Philippe's mouth, his soul streaming out of his body and fusing into an infinity halo over my head.

"I believe you cannot turn away, Michael," she whispered. "I believe in my father's trust in you."

Strength.
Philippe's soul flowing into my body, merging with my spirit. His fight becoming mine. His wounds becoming mine. His legacy, becoming mine.

"Okay?" she asked. "No lies between us."

Strength.

"Okay."

I wanted to kiss her then. To pretend it was five years ago and we were still innocent and unaware of the future. That we were still in that other bedroom, flush with the fantasy of New Year's Eve and living on the cusp of something new. It hadn't happened yet, and as long as we didn't move, as long as we didn't leave that bed, nothing would happen. We would stay safe, and the future would never come. Or that we were still on the dance floor, caught in the lock groove, circling one another as if we were the only two bodies in the entire galaxy. Exerting an inexorable pull on one another.

But there was a fire in my head. Furious sparks that weren't mine. I couldn't put them out, as much as I wanted to. They were the present and the future, and the past was getting more distant and more muddled with every hour. I couldn't go back, not without losing my mind. I had to go forward. I had to accept what I had become.

Strength.

I told Marielle how her father died and what happened to him afterward. To her credit, she took it really well.

But, then, I was pretty sure she already knew.

"As a first step towards the successful prosecution of an investigation into the true nature and character of the mysterious object we know as the Grail it will be well to ask ourselves whether any light may be thrown upon the subject by examining more closely the details of the Quest in its varying forms; i.e., what was the precise character of the task undertaken by, or imposed upon, the Grail hero, whether that hero were Gawain, Perceval, or Galahad, and what the results were to be expected from a successful achievement of the task."

– Jessie L. Weston,
From Ritual to Romance

Light reflected off a mirror, a flash like a flare of flame from a newly woken fire. The Chorus exploded out of me, a flock of startled birds, and they rose overhead into a swarming mass. Near the gangway, a man stepped onto the walkway—leaving the boat—and the light off his glasses was lessened by the fact that he was turning away from us, but the flare was still there.

I was off the bench before Marielle could say anything, and by the time I reached the railing, the gangway was empty. The Chorus fell back into a defensive perimeter, their astral wings collapsing about me, but there was no threat. Just the queasy uneasiness of having been spotted.

Down on the dock, a figure separated himself from the crowd and approached a black car idling nearby. He looked back once more before he got in, and I saw the sunglasses again. He wasn't wearing the centurion uniform, but the glasses were the same.

"There." I pointed him out to Marielle, but by the time she looked, he was already in the car.

"Who was it?" she asked as the car drove away.

"I don't know." He seemed familiar, beyond being the man from before, but not so familiar that I could place him. What with the poison-inspired visions, the wealth of knowledge hidden within me by the Architects, and my own history with the Watchers, it was difficult to pinpoint why he had been familiar. Or, even, could he have been the man at the airport? "He was wearing sunglasses."

"At night?" She drew me away from the edge of the boat. "Were they polished? The kind that are like mirrors?"

"Yeah. They were."

"A scryer." Seeing my expression, she explained. "They see the future in reflective surfaces. They don't need water anymore. Mirrors work well too."

"The glasses are mirrored on both sides?"

"Yes. Mirroring the outside protects them. Makes it easier for them to be invisible."

"This is the second time I've seen him," I said. "Earlier, he was downstairs."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I thought he was a hallucination." I decided not to mention the illusion of having seen Antoine. "He wasn't dressed like all the others. He had this faux Roman centurion outfit on. With a big plumed headdress and a broken staff."

"Broken? Are you sure? Was it a spear without a point or a broken staff?"

I tried to remember. "It was just a stick with the top broken off. But, if it was part of his costume, then it might have been a spear, but it seemed wrong. Why would you go to all the effort with the rest of the costume and then not have a real spear?"

And the oil on the shaft too. What had that been about? I couldn't place the symbolism, even though I should have known. It kept slipping away from me.

"For the same reason you'd go to the trouble of imagining him wearing the costume in the first place," she said.

"And why would I do that?"

She stared at me. "You're kidding me, right?"

"No. I don't know what you're talking about."
I should know.

"How can you have my father in your head and not know what you saw?"

"He's not sitting in his favorite chair by the fire, doling out arcane secrets on demand. He's this . . . sort of persistent sense of déjà vu that comes and goes. Sometimes, I know exactly what he knew, and other times—most of the time—there's only a nagging sense that I'm missing something. It's like when you forget where you put your car keys. You know they exist, and you know you had them, but you can't figure out where you left them. But, abstract it one layer up. I don't even know that it is the car keys that I'm looking for."

I realized I was still holding the tarot card, but it wasn't Strength anymore. The lines had twisted, changing the image from a woman holding open a lion's mouth to a pair of cherubic children on the back of a draft horse. A pair of apple-cheeked, blonde-haired babies basking in the glow of the sun. I handed Marielle the card while I dug for the bag in my pocket. "How did you do that magic trick?" I asked.

"With the card?" She glanced at it. "I was going to ask you. It was an eerie bit of sleight-of-hand."

"I didn't." I pulled open the strings of the bag and reached in for a handful of cards. They were slippery—mischievous and intent on getting away from me—but I grabbed them quick and held tight. "It's your father's deck, and it seems to miss him." I nodded toward the card in her hand. "What card is that?"

She held it up. "Strength."

I shook my head, and shuffled through the cards until I found the one I was looking for. "This is Strength." My fingers tingled when I named the card, and from the way the Chorus churned, I knew that it wasn't, even though my eyes told me otherwise.

"It's the Fool, Michael," Marielle said. "You're holding the Fool."

Of course I was.

"No, I'm holding Strength, and you're holding the Sun. What you see is the Fool and Strength," I said, pointing to each of the cards.

"I don't understand this game," she said.

I took the card from her, and as I touched it, the lines started to squirm and change. I shuffled it back into the deck, along with the card I had picked out. "They keep changing on me. Sometimes into other cards, sometimes into weird amalgamations of multiple cards. I cut the deck in half and showed her. "See? Strength and the Fool." I waited until she nodded in agreement and then I put my hands back together, and without changing their position, split the deck in the same place again. "Now what do you see?"

"The same thing."

I looked. "I see the Sun and the High Priestess."

"How is that possible?" she asked.

"I don't know if it has something to do with your father or if I'm just losing my mind from all the recent activity in my brain, but the lines don't stay in place. The cards keep shifting, as if he's using them to communicate. Not very clearly, mind you. But when he wants to tell me something, he manipulates the cards."

In spite of the implication of her father being un-dead, Marielle stepped closer and grabbed my arm. "What are they telling you?" Her grip was tighter than necessary, and her body was uncharacteristically rigid.

"The Sun and the High Priestess," I said, putting the deck back together and taking advantage of that motion to drag my arm out of her grasp. Shuffling the deck a few more times, I cut it, reversed the halves, and went to flip over the top card.

"Stop." Marielle covered the deck with her hand. "No, I believe you."

"It's just a card," I said. "It's all in my head."

"It isn't," she said. Her tongue touched her lip nervously. "Leave it alone. Don't invite anything in. Not with those cards. Let them be."

"You have a better idea?" I asked as the Chorus slid around my spine and squeezed. What was it about the Sun and the High Priestess that had her so agitated?

She hesitated, caught by some internal argument.

"We've been spotted. We need to go somewhere else."

Marielle's gravity well fluttered. For a second, she almost seemed to be a little girl again, and then the weight of her Will came down and the image vanished.

"What about Tevvys' phone?" I suggested, trying to jostle her out of her mental peregrinations. "We could try to crack his passcode."

"I don't have it."

"What? Moreau gave it to you."

"He did, but I don't have it anymore. I left it back at the apartment."

"Why didn't you say so in the car?"

"I was—" She took a deep breath. "It doesn't matter."

"It does. I told Moreau—"

She cut me off. "It doesn't matter. It was a dumb idea."

"No, it wasn't."

"It was. For a number of reasons. Besides, if they wanted to call us, they'd call my phone. I'm sure someone has the number."

I wanted to argue the point, but before the words got all the way out of my throat, I realized she was right. If they wanted to talk, they'd be able to figure out how to reach us. No one knew my number but Marielle, but I'm sure a lot of the Watchers knew her number. The Chorus chattered, admonishing me too, and I bristled more at their umbrage than Marielle's comments.
What was the other choice?
I asked them.
Killing Moreau?

I blocked their response, as the question had been rhetorical. It was so easy to find that path again, wasn't it? And what had I gained from going that route previously? Walking the dark path in the wood had only brought me and others pain. That wasn't the way. Regardless of what others wanted me to do.

"Don't worry about it," she said, filling my silence. "I'm sure Moreau took you seriously when you told him. And he might even have tried to follow your—"

"Don't," I said. "I get it. I fucked up."

She ran her hands through her hair, brushing it back from her face. "I'm sure the building collapsed on him," she said finally. "Squashed him flat."

"I'm sure he sold us out the first chance he got," I said, nearly at the same time.

We paused, waiting for the other to speak, and when neither of us leaped into the gap, she smiled. "What is done is done. Let's move on."

"Agreed." I waited for a second before asking. "The cards."

Her smile faded, but she nodded.

I turned over the top card of the deck. The Sun. The twins on horseback. Lafoutain moved in the cloud of the Chorus, and one word escaped from the vortex of their noise.
Daughters.

Marielle eyed the card with some trepidation, and when I tapped it, she looked away somewhat nervously. The Chorus couldn't read her: her pulse was gone, and the swirling energy caught beneath the boat dispersed into the general stream of psychic force that ran through Paris.

"Daughters." When she appeared to not hear me, I said it again. "Tell me about the daughters, Marielle."

She searched my face for some sign that I knew what I was talking about, and the Chorus slapped away her subtle attempt to read my aura. I locked myself off as completely as she had—
two can play this game
—and stared back at her. Willing to wait her out.

When I had started to explain to her how her father moved in the cards, she had been nervous. Anxious, as if her father could tell me something she didn't want me to know. Like father, like daughter: the family couldn't help but keep secrets. Was that what Lafoutain was talking about? The age-old argument that men are transparent, unable to keep a secret to save their lives, but it is women who are impossible to read. If you want any secret to be truly kept confidential, you tell your daughter and not your son.

"All right," Marielle said. She nodded toward the quay. "Find us a cab. I'll call ahead and let them know we're coming. They can tell you themselves."

She seemed relieved that I hadn't asked about the High Priestess.

Tour Montparnasse stuck out of the glittering landscape of Paris like a bruised middle finger. The skyscraper was one of those concessions to modernity that was immediately regretted as soon as it was finished; shortly after the building was done, Paris outlawed any further skyscrapers within the central part of the city. One of those rare moments of humility from a civic government, and some believe the building remains so that no one ever forgets. You can kill the magic of a city by changing it too much.

It reminded me of the Eglanteria Terrace, the building in Portland where Bernard took the theurgic mirror and launched his assault on humanity. A spire to Heaven, drenched in darkness.