Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I (9 page)

“Why I . . . I’m looking for you!” I replied.

Mephistopheles was slight and lithe with warm brown eyes. He was also filthy. Dirt and oily grime coated his poncho. His matted stringy black hair had not been washed, or perhaps even combed, in months. His cheap sneakers were riddled with holes. Through one hole protruded the big toe of his left foot, the nail of which was rotten and caked with pus. And he stank, abominably.

He sat on the tomato crate gazing at me fearfully. Then, a glint of comprehension sparked behind the emptiness in his eyes. He leapt to his feet and flung out his arms to embrace me, whooping with joy. The lute he had been playing flew from his hands and crashed upon the cement sidewalk, shattering into several pieces.

“You found it!” Mephisto cried, oblivious of the lute. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “You found it!”

“Found what?” I threw up my hands to ward him away as he tried to kiss me. The stench was unbearable. Still, I was happy to see he was in one
of his cheerful periods. Mephisto stared at me in wonder, as if amazed anyone could be thinking of a subject other than what was on his mind.

My initial shock at encountering my long-lost brother on a random side street faded the instant I recalled that my Lady had prompted me to walk in this direction. That was how the Lady of Spiral Wisdom worked, subtly and indirectly, yet leading me always onward to my goal.

“My staff, Miranda! You found my staff?” His voice rose to end on a hopeful note.

“No.”

“Oh.”

Mephisto stepped back and hung his head. I brushed at the grime that now clung to my white coat with a handkerchief I found in my pocket. Several passers-by stopped to look at the shattered lute where it lay upon the concrete, a tangle of splinters and strings. Their attention drew my brother’s.

An unarticulated moan came from Mephisto’s lips. He rushed over and scooped up the broken lute, cradling the pieces in his arms and keening softly. He looked back despairingly toward me, his pathetic face streaked with tears.

“Not my lute! Not my lovely lute, too,” he cried. Laying his cheek against the broken neck of the instrument, he whispered, “Who did this, my lovely? Who did this to you?”

Big wet tears rolled slowly over his hollow cheeks. Watching the pathetic figure of my weeping brother, I contrasted him in my mind’s eye with the handsome statue of his youthful self.

Mab stepped up beside me and spoke in a low voice. “The poor sucker doesn’t even remember that he threw it.”

“It breaks my heart, Mab.”

“Didn’t know you had one, Ma’am.”

I stepped forward and put my hand on Mephisto’s grime-caked arm. “It’s all right, Mephisto. I’ll buy you another one.”

“I don’t want another lute. This was my lute,” he began.

“The next one will be yours too.”

“. . . I’ve had my lute almost my whole life.” A haunted look came into his eye. “It’s the one my mother gave me; my mother’s been dead over four hundred years. It’s the lute I played for Queen Elizabeth.”

I stepped away, back to where Mab stood. He was squinting at the fragments of lute.

“Was that really a fifteenth-century lute?” Mab asked.

“Most likely he lost that one long ago and forgot he’d replaced it.” I shrugged. “But it is possible.”

Mephisto began walking. He wound his way through the pedestrians until he came to a trash can. There, he unstrung the strings from the neck and body and ceremoniously lowered the broken remains into the wire bin. Wandering back to the tomato crate, he sat with his hands over his face.

In a tired and ragged voice, he said, “Breaks. Stolen. Falls apart. Everything I love gets destroyed. My staff is gone. I can’t find my Bully Boy. My friends don’t recognize me. A woman killed my cat with a car. She said she was sorry afterwards. Does that make it okay? All the things I love get destroyed, and there is nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can do to protect them.”

Mab spoke softly in my ear. “I think he’s forgotten us.”

I nodded.

Mab lowered the brim of his hat. “He’s not going to hear any warning you give him, Ma’am, and he’s in no position to respond if he did.” When I did not answer, Mab continued, “Mr. Prospero told me nothing could be done for him. He said Mephisto resisted every attempt your family made to help him.”

“It’s true. Every time Mephisto seemed to improve, he would suddenly grow obstinate and refuse to continue his treatment. We tried locking him up, but sooner or later he’d escape or one of his supernatural beast friends would show up to break him out. Eventually, Father washed his hands of the matter and said we had to let him go his own way.”

“Let’s go then,” said Mab, “There’s nothing else we can do.”

I started to turn away, then hesitated.

“There’s one big difference between the past and now.”

“What’s that, Ma’am?”

“Normally, Mephisto has all sorts of supernatural friends to help him. When he has his staff, no number of ordinary thugs could overwhelm him. Without it? He may be faster and stronger than a normal mortal, but in his current condition, he could be taken out by a bum with a knife.” Frowning, I contrasted in my mind once more the picture of my brother, broken and dirty on the sidewalk, with the intelligent young man portrayed by his statue. “We can’t leave him like this, Mab!”

“We can’t do anything for him here,” Mab gestured at the sidewalk. He waved his hand in front of his face to dissipate the awful stink.

Walking over to Mephisto I grabbed his arm and dragged him to his feet.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

I HAD
just finished my soup and was beginning on my salad when the door into the men’s bedroom finally opened. A wet and bedraggled Mab came slouching into the parlor of our suite. Mab had been saddled with the unpleasant job of stripping Mephisto down and piling him into the shower, while I went out to purchase a new wardrobe for my brother. On the way back, I had stopped at a theater costume shop, where I had found a royal blue surcoat emblazoned with the fleur-de-lis, left over from a performance of
The Lion in Winter
. It was my hope Mephisto would accept it as a replacement for the ghastly poncho. As best I understood, he had started wearing ponchos to begin with as a replacement for his royal tabard.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Admiring his new duds in the mirror,” Mab growled. “He’ll be out here soon enough, once he smells the food.”

As Mab pulled the silver dome off his lunch, the door opened again to admit my brother.

Mephisto looked like a different man. He was clean. His newly-cut hair formed a halo of wavy dark curls around his head. He wore a loose, black, Russian shirt and black trousers with high black-leather boots. Over the black clothes, he had thrown the royal blue surcoat emblazoned with the fleur-de-lis in silver. When he came forward and embraced me, he smelled pleasantly of Old Spice aftershave. I had not seen him look so neatly turned out in many, many years.

Mephisto leapt back. He spread his arms and threw back his head, assuming the pose he had immortalized in his statue of himself.

“Don’t you recognize me?” he cried happily.

“Of course, I recognize you, Mephisto.” I looked him over once, and then gestured toward the food cart. “Ah . . . why don’t you pull up a chair and eat your lunch? You look famished.”

He really did, too. He was thin, almost emaciated. I wondered if he had eaten in days.

Mephisto pulled up a straight-backed chair to the serving cart of food room service had provided and began devouring the fare. He inhaled whole slices of pizza and devoured sandwich halves in a single bite. His eyes, however, remained fixed fondly, though warily, on my face.

“So?” he asked happily, his mouth full.

“I believe something may have happened to Father,” I began. “He sent me a note that suggests he ran afoul of powers he could not control. His message asked that I warn the family if I did not hear from him. When I found the message, I sent Aerie Ones to his house on the island, but he hadn’t been back since he left to come to America in September. So, I’m warning the family. Beware the Three Shadowed Ones.”

“They’re after our staffs!” Mephisto exclaimed.

“How did you know?”

“They took mine, didn’t they?”

“I thought yours was stolen by some strumpet you took home for the night.”

“That’s because you didn’t stick around to hear the whole story,” Mephisto shot back accusingly.

“You were drunk.”

“You were rude.”

This was getting us nowhere.

“Someone broke into the house and . . . did some damage,” I said, returning to the earlier topic. It was too soon after the lute fiasco to tell Mephistopheles about the shattered statues. “I believe it was one of these Three Shadowed Ones, and he was after our staffs.”

“I told you!” Mephisto turned to Mab. “Didn’t I tell her?”

“That’s not all, Mephisto,” I continued. “The creature that broke into the mansion . . . it was an incubus.”

“What?” exclaimed Mephisto

“A Power of Hell!”

“Oh, them.” He reached for a biscuit.

A shiver ran down my spine. Was Mephisto so far gone he no longer feared the servants of Hell? If so, he was not just out of it, he was dangerous to be near! Either way, it was time to do what I came to do and go.

“Look, I’ve given you Father’s warning. Now, you know. Father said to ‘keep close the gifts he had given.’ In your case, the warning came too late. All the same. I thought you should know.”

“Who else have you warned?”

“No one yet. You’re the first.”

Mephisto wiped his mouth with one of the napkins provided. “What a good move! Now you’ll have me to help you find the others.”

“Great comfort that is,” muttered Mab, from where he sat hunched over his lunch. Apparently, he was still disgruntled from the drenching he had
taken bathing my brother. Mephisto regarded Mab, and then turned back to me, cocking his head.

“Where’d you chase up this one? He looks like something out of the movies. Is he your bodyguard?”

I laughed, and Mab snorted.

“A body would have to be crazy to guard the likes of her. Always rushing in where angels fear to tread.”

I stood to perform the proper introductions. “Mephisto, this is Mab Boreal, one of the Incarnated Northerlies. He heads our company detectives. Mab, this is my brother Mephisto.”

“Detective?” Mephisto’s eyes shone brightly. “As in ‘finds lost things’?”

I nodded.

“And he’s traveling with you? . . . And you’re going where now? To warn the others? The others who have staffs these Three Shadowy Ones might be hunting down as we speak?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Mephisto glanced back and forth between Mab and myself. Then, he gave us his brightest smile. “When do we leave?”

“No. Absolutely not.” Mab rose to his feet and stalked over to stand in front of me. “There is no way, Ma’am, that I am going to help this kook find his magical glorified kindling.”

“ ‘Kook’? Who you calling a kook? Mr. Sam Spade wannabe?” Mephisto turned to me. “Tell him how great it will be, Miranda. Just like old times! We’ll travel together, and I’ll help you. And if we just happen upon my staff? Well, that’s fine, too.”

His mention of old times evoked memories of countless treks, some pleasant, some disastrous. I recalled one time Father, Mephisto, and I had gone to Switzerland to meet with a yeti and discuss avalanches. Taking Mephisto, the Beast Tamer, instead of one of the enforcers—Theo, Titus, or Gregor—had turned out to be a mistake. Mephisto did gain a new shaggy friend he could summon up with a tap of his staff; however, nothing was ever done to improve the avalanche situation.

“No, Mephisto,” I said firmly as I pictured Mephisto’s well-meaning antics resulting in my being buried under ten feet of snow again.

“At last, she shows some sense,” muttered Mab.

“But, you’ll need help. What if the Three Shadowed Ones attack?” Mephisto said.

Mab snorted. “What help would you be?”

“I could hit them with my lute,” Mephisto offered helpfully, evidently forgetting the instrument he had broken. Or perhaps he was envisioning a fate for the one I had promised to buy him.

“No. I’ll leave you a little money. You won’t be destitute.” I made a mental note to dispatch an Aerie One to keep an eye on him.

“But I could help. I know I could,” he continued plaintively. “I knew how to use a sword . . . once.”

“No.”

“Please! Don’t leave me behind, Miranda. I’m afraid to be on my own without my staff. Please?”

I hated to hear him beg. He sounded so pathetic. Yet, I was certain if I brought him along, it would lead to another calamity such as our encounter with the yeti, or the time Theo and I were nearly drowned by his mermaid friends. We were facing the Powers of Hell, and even a slight mistake could lead to a fate far worse than frostbite.

“Come on, Mab,” I said, “We need to keep going. Lives could be at stake.”