The Immortal Game (book 1) (2 page)

He reared back as if she had stabbed him with a knife, then scowled. “We need to play again.”

He turned toward the back corner of the room clearly expecting her to follow.

“I can’t. I have reading to do.”

Ash turned toward her again and she stepped back at the fiery look in his eyes. He didn’t say anything more and turned again to the chessboard.

“Really,
I can’t
.” She threaded through the eclectic mix of mismatched chairs and tables toward the counter.

“I want you to walk me through what you did.” It was like he hadn’t heard her.

She took the coffee and Ambrosia Bar from Sage—who watched their conversation as if it were a volley in a tennis match—and walked back to her table.

Ash followed.

She took out her history text, sat down and crossed her arms, daring him to push further. “I told you,” she said. “I have reading to do.”

He pulled out a chair across from her. “I’ll wait.”

Her eyes shot to his face.

“What?”

He wasn’t smiling, just staring.

She exhaled in a huff, flipped open the text, and searched for her page.

He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. Dark circles shadowed his lower lids but his eyes were unwavering.

She did her best to ignore him and take in the finer points of the Battle of Hastings, but Ash’s presence was distracting. When she glanced up, his determined look had not faltered. He seriously planned to wait her out.

She dropped her book flat onto the table with a loud thud and leaned forward. “I really can’t concentrate on William the Conqueror and all of his…” She blinked. “…
conquering
, with you staring at me.”

He sat forward too. A glimmer of recognition lit his hard eyes. Was he getting the hint after all?

“William? Of Normandy?” he asked.

She looked at the page, to a picture of a general astride his horse leading a regiment into battle. The caption read: “William the Conqueror leads the Norman army against King Harold II and the Saxons.” She was about to nod, but Ash was already speaking
.

“Now that was a battle.” A smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “None of this dropping bombs from planes or shooting from inside armored tanks. It was man against man. Harold and his Saxons had the better position on the hill. Their shields overlapped and they held a steady front line, but they were tired from riding across the country.”

She stared at him, but his eyes slid past her.

“William and the Normans were rested. And eager. They led with archers and followed with the infantry. Swords clashed with axes and thudded against shields. The shouts of the men were deafening.” Ash’s nostrils flared. “The cavalry at the rear held their horses back and waited for the signal from Will, who was at the center of everything.”

Will?
she wondered.
Will of Normandy?

“The archers were soon whittled down and the cavalry descended. Early on there were rumors Will had been killed. His men faltered.” Ash paused for effect. His eyes were on her. “He rode the ranks without his helmet, risking himself, and spurred the troops on. Will was new to battle.” Ash smiled, his white teeth lined up like soldiers. “But he was a good leader of men.

“When Will realized the armies were well-matched, he called his men back. Harold took it for a retreat.” Ash shook his head. “Harold was too cocky. He’d beaten his own brother’s army just weeks before. Harold’s troops followed Will’s withdrawing men in an unorganized show of force. When Will turned his feigning soldiers onto Harold’s broken ranks it was the beginning of the end, right there.”

Ruby glanced at the picture in the book. It was like any other scene of a general in battle. William was in uniform with the troops around him, suspended forever in the moment before they met their fate: death or glory.

“And do you know what helped to start it all?” Ash asked. “Do you know that Halley’s Comet helped William the Conqueror win the crown of England?”

All she managed was a small shake of her head. She was trying to take it all in; Ash’s knowledge of the battle, his understanding of troop movements …
Halley’s Comet?

“The comet was a bad omen,” he said. “It gave Harold reason to worry and it gave William a reason to build his ships!” He laughed, a deep sound that resonated somewhere in her chest.

“It did turn out to be an unlucky day for Harold. In the evening there was a lull in the fighting. Harold heard the whiz of an arrow and looked up.” Ash
tsk
ed and shook his head, but still smiled. “Got him right in the eye.”

Ruby’s face dropped. Anger filled the empty stunned space in her mind. “You think that’s funny? All that killing.” She thought of the bombs at the telephone exchanges and the cell towers, all those people dead. She thought of her father. She thought of the wound on Ash’s hand. He had acted like it wasn’t there the night before. Her eyes darted to the edge of the table but his hands were below the surface. She couldn’t see if he had bothered to put a bandage on it or not. It might get infected.

“I have to go,” she said as she packed up the book and wrapped the half-eaten Ambrosia Bar in a napkin.

“What about our game?” He moved his chair out as if to stop her.

“I don’t have time.”

His nostrils flared again, this time in anger rather than excitement. His jaw clenched. His eyes darted around as if he’d lost something that should be right in front of him.

She wondered what might come next. He acted like a man who could easily start punching a wall. The outline of muscle beneath his T-shirt told her that he had the strength to do some damage.

Instead his hand came up and rubbed at the dark stubble along his jaw.

What she saw made her stomach lurch. She stopped worrying about his temper and stared at his hand sliding back and forth.

Had it been
that
hand? The left? She knew it had. It had the same ring, dark and pitted, old looking. But where was the wound? It was gone.

There was nothing but a faint shiny line where the gash had been.

TWO

A cool breeze rustled the gold and crimson leaves in the trees that lined the campus walkway and Ruby caught the woody scents of autumn. She unwrapped her half eaten Ambrosia Bar and ate it in two big bites as she walked. The chewy brown outside was the perfect contrast to the gooey golden filling and she was disappointed when it was gone. She consoled herself with a sip of her latte but it tasted flat and ordinary in comparison.

Extra police and security guards had patrolled the quads and the corridors since the telephone bombings, but the grip of panic had loosened as days went by without another attack. Now the wide concrete path became busier the closer Ruby got to the science quad.

Mendeleev Hall buzzed with people comparing notes about the bombing. Ruby picked up her graded exam from the pile at the front of the room and found her seat in the stadium-style lecture hall.

She put the quiz facedown on the desk and watched Dr. Reed, in his signature tartan sport coat, take a thick pile of papers out of his briefcase and ready himself for the lecture.

She drummed her pencil on the tabletop and told herself that this grade wasn’t
that
important. It was just a quiz, a preface to the weightier exam at the end of the week. But she knew she needed a ninety. She needed at least a three-point-five GPA.

She took a deep breath.

In a fit of courage she flipped the paper over and looked for the red number she knew would be neatly written in the upper left hand corner. Her face fell. She blinked.
Seventy
? She checked for her name at the top of the paper. This couldn’t be
her
test. She must have picked up the wrong one. But it was hers.

She looked down at the questions, then at her answers. She had studied for days. How could she
not
know this stuff?

There was little time to dwell. Dr. Reed’s tartan coat now hung from the back of a chair near the front of the room and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He wrote a series of molecules on the whiteboard. Ruby folded her quiz in half and jammed it between the pages of her textbook. She opened her notes and scrawled the complex shapes of the molecules as fast as she could.

After the lecture Mark caught her eye as she flexed her cramped right hand. He slipped out of the space between the desktop and the molded plastic chair and waved. “Hey, Ruby, wait up.”

“How’d you do?” he asked as he pulled out his copy of the quiz in the crowded hall. “I got a ninety-five.”

She had met Mark at her study group. His hair was gelled into a frenzy of short blond spikes and he had a painful looking pimple by his right ear. He rubbed the back of his neck and scanned his paper. “I can’t believe I missed one. What did you get for number six?”

“I’d have to look,” she said, avoiding eye contact. They passed the microbiology lab and she caught a sharp whiff of ripe bacteria, a cross between sweaty socks and moist cheese.

“I forgot to finish balancing my equation,” he said. “Too many hydrogens in my product. I’ll need to be careful on the exam Friday. Are you coming to the study group?”

“Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I?” She glanced at him, wondering if maybe she wasn’t invited.

“You want to get a coffee or something before?” he said, a little too quickly.

“Nah.” She looked down at the glossy grey- and brown-flecked floor. “I’ll probably just study.”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat and nodded. “Me too.”

Mark had asked her to coffee before, and to the movies, and to a party once, but her focus was school. It had to be. Her father’s legacy was her driving force. She would be a doctor. She would dedicate her life to helping people in war-torn countries. Helping people was what mattered.

…

Dr. Garcia’s rendition of the Battle of Hastings was drier than Ash’s, all dates and locations. He mentioned that William the Conqueror rode through the fighting without his helmet to reassure his troops he hadn’t been killed.

Ruby wondered if Ash was a chess master
and
a history buff. Maybe he was a genius.

She thought about the wound, or the lack of a wound, on his hand. Had there been a big open gash there? Yesterday?
Last
night
? Of course there had. She hadn’t just imagined it.

In the end Dr. Garcia confirmed everything Ash said—even the part about Halley’s Comet, when Ruby asked about it. It wasn’t the fact that Ash knew minor details about a war that happened a thousand years ago that struck her as odd. It was
how
he knew them. Like he’d been there.

Dr. Garcia asked if there were more questions and Ruby had plenty, but none that he could answer.

…

After class Ruby walked to Athenaeum, two blocks off campus. She started directly for the chess table in the back. She’d play Ash again, but this time
she’d
get some answers.

Halfway there she stopped short. The chess board was set up but the seats were empty. She scanned the coffeehouse.

Athenaeum was more crowded than it had been in days. The room was once again filled with the familiar chatter of students in late afternoon, sipping coffee and eating Ambrosia Bars. Sage moved around the room, shelving books. She held one up in a gesture of hello. Ruby responded with a weak little wave. A tall man with close-cropped platinum blond hair read poetry from a black journal to a group of people near the window. She thought his name was Langston.

But there was no Ash.

It seemed like he had always been there before. But had he? She didn’t know. She studied at Athenaeum most days, but she hadn’t paid attention.

She wanted a coffee and an Ambrosia Bar, but instead of ordering she sat in a chair that faced the wood-framed glass door. She could hear Langston reading a poem over the din of the room. He was reciting something about love denied when a much closer voice broke in.

“I got to play him last week,” a woman said to her friends at the table next to Ruby.

Ruby looked at them from the corner of her eye.

The woman who had spoken had dark hair and sipped her coffee without making eye contact with the other two women at her table. Her deliberate casualness only exaggerated the comment. “He’s totally brilliant,” she added as an afterthought.

“And
hot,
” another one said.

Ruby heard honest-to-goodness giggles from all three of them.

She took out her chemistry notes and tried to focus. She’d spent too much energy on Ash already and not nearly enough on what was important.

“I know a girl who knows a girl who dated him,” said another of the women, a petite blond.

Ruby’s eyes widened at the intrusion into her thoughts. She leaned toward them, unable to help herself. “Ash’s married, you know?”

The three women’s heads swiveled in unison to stare at her. Ruby opened her mouth to elaborate, but it was Sage, shelving a book nearby, who spoke instead.

“Ash? Married?” She laughed, as if it were the most ridiculous idea she’d heard. “No. Not Ash.”

“But he has a wedding ring.” Ruby turned to face the barista. “And he had to leave here last night. To go to his wife. You said she was ‘high maintenance.’”

Sage laughed harder and shook her head. Her black curls bounced on the collar of her white shirt. Her amethyst earrings swayed with the rhythm. “That’s an entirely different sort of problem.”

Ruby watched Sage’s brown skirt swish as she walked back to her piles of books at the counter. The poet stopped reading and looked up from across the room. Ruby saw him make eye contact with Sage. She waved him away but she was still laughing.

There was no time to make sense of it all before Ruby realized that the three women were still looking at her.

The blond smirked. “Wrong much?”

Ruby looked down at the scuffed wooden floor. The tips of her ears burned. Where had her line of logic gone wrong? The ring, the …

The front door opened in a rush. The force of it rustled the papers hanging on a nearby bulletin board. Her head popped up and her heart thudded as she saw Ash striding toward her, tall and lithe.