The thought struck her and she couldn’t keep back the laugh, despite her supposed
sickly
state. He tipped his head, blue eyes twinkling in anticipation. They shared the same odd humor, which is one of the reasons she picked Mike to work on the probate. “What?”
“So she’s finally sending you off on a wild goose chase, huh?” She grinned and waited for his reaction.
His laugh was loud and barking and he threw his body back against the chair so hard he nearly fell over. “I guess that’s true. Never looked at it that way. Now I’ll have to grill her about what
she’ll
be up to while I’m off on it.” Another shared chuckle, and then he dropped back into a more serious expression. “Well, you probably heard we got another motion from the Rankin boys.”
Her brow furrowed and she let out a tense breath. “Yeah. What’s that about?”
“Well, they
claim
they have new evidence that Lillian had a mental disorder. They want to depose you about the symptoms and bring in an expert witness to view the will-reading video to show she wasn’t competent. I’m betting they’ll also try to use the expert to show that you were somehow aware of this alleged
disorder
and took advantage of her. They want the deposition to take place before the judge makes his final decision.”
The little frustrated scream escaped her before she could stop it. “Aah! Those men are driving me
nuts
. Lillian Armstrong was a completely sane, brilliant attorney. You know it as well as I do. I mean, I didn’t
ask
to be her heir. I never planned to be anything more than her secretary.”
He nodded, his salt-and-pepper hair catching the overhead light in flashes. “I know that. And, as the attorney who prepared her will, I’m well aware just how competent she was. She knew full well that they’d contest the will and did everything she could to counter their arguments beforehand. But, of course, if her nephews can prove incompetence, all the planning won’t matter. Ordinarily, I’d suggest we ignore this and deal with it later if the judge approves the motion. But with me leaving for Canada, that sort of changes things. If anything were to happen to me it would take another attorney
months
to come up to speed on this. We need to put the ball back in their court so they’re the ones delaying the process.”
Mila found herself nodding. She shifted the weight of the file to her other arm, where her coat would cushion the sharp paper edges from where they were cutting into her skin. “Force them to
produce
this alleged evidence before the judge has a chance to decide?”
“And to produce any person they got the knowledge from for our own depositions. We won’t let them speculate based on book definitions of the disorder without producing an independent witness who will testify they
saw
Lillian exhibit the symptoms. That takes it off your shoulders.” He held out a tape with a sad sort of grimace. “I dictated it yesterday, but April left early yesterday with the same crud you’ve got. It’s hit or miss whether she’ll be in today. Can you hang in there long enough to whip it out? I’m only here until noon.”
Another glance at her watch, another fifteen minutes gone. The minutes were swimming by, like someone was moving the dials while she wasn’t looking. She needed to get out of here … but this was her
home,
not just a question of whether a business was going to be forced to pay damages for using a similar name to another company, like in the Johnson case. She sighed and stepped forward. “Of course I will. Can I use April’s computer real quick?”
Mike shook his head as he tossed the tape to her. “That’s close enough, thanks. And sorry, but her machine’s down, too, because of that idiot temp. I hope the firm sues that agency. He shut the whole place down yesterday. That’s why I sent her home early. She was willing to stay and get it out, but there was nothing to type
on.
I presume you found a machine?”
She nodded as she caught it, actually feeling a little sick now. “Alan Lee’s office. I was on my way down there.” While she knew logically it wasn’t really her fault, Mila couldn’t help but feel a stab of conscience. No, she couldn’t have stopped having an episode, but she
should
have come back to work as soon as she woke up. Then there wouldn’t have been a question of running around to hospitals and gardens and the whole firm wouldn’t have been screwed by the actions of Bob the temp. She never would have gotten involved … with Vegre, with magical eggs and sinister plots, or—
With Tal
—That stopped her cold and she realized she had a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach at the thought.
I wouldn’t have met him, wouldn’t have kissed him, and never would have learned the reason for my episodes all these years.
She forced a smile and raised the microcassette to shake it lightly, listening to the click of the gears rattling. “I’ll do it first thing, so you can get out of here. But there’s not a transcriber in Alan’s office. I’ll have to use your handheld, if that’s okay.”
He nodded, dug under some papers, took out the tape inside, and tossed that as well. “It’s not very long, maybe a couple pages. When you’re done, just buzz me and leave it on the half-wall outside. I can get someone else to get the exhibits together and file it. That way you can finish your own work and get out of here.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “That would be great. I might be able to find my way out of the sequential vortex now.”
“No problem. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have my own vortex to escape so I can pack and catch my plane. I had to bump up the ticket to miss the winter storm they’re forecasting. First-class rates, so I shudder at the thought of missing it.”
She was already turning to leave. “Color me gone.” But then she paused and turned. “By the way, Mike.” He raised his brows and waited. “Thanks. For everything. I know Lillian would really be pleased at how hard you’re working on this, and I wouldn’t have been able to fight it without you working pro bono for me.”
He waved off the praise. “Hey, don’t worry about it. You’ve pitched in plenty through the years. You’ve paid your sweat equity a hundred times over.”
She smiled and walked away, feeling at least a
little
less guilty about the mess the temp had caused. Because Mike was right—she
had
worked hard over the decade she’d worked for the firm. She’d started as a file clerk right out of high school and eventually had found herself working as paralegal to one of the firm’s senior partners—Lillian Armstrong.
I do miss you
,
Lillian.
The white-haired firecracker had taught her to be confident, strong, and not take any shit from anyone. And for her to be taken down so suddenly … by a simple case of the flu.
If only I could have helped—but she was too proud to let me
.
It was a stark reminder of Suzanne’s plight. As she stepped off the elevator onto the darkened twenty-fourth floor, lit only by the few fluorescent bulbs assigned to after-hours security, she wished there had been some news from Baba—a phone message or note under the door. But although she’d immediately called her voice mail when they got home and checked her cell phone for missed calls, there was nothing.
Alan’s office was cool and dark, except for the dancing electronic flames that decorated a digital picture frame on his credenza. She’d never seen one like it. The images of his family and life appeared and disappeared into the flames every few seconds. One picture in particular caught her attention. Alan was a good-looking man, but she hadn’t realized just how similar he looked to Tal. That one photo, of Alan climbing a rock wall, his face intense and focused, reminded her so much of Tal last night it was a little frightening.
The whole situation was frightening. Yet, she couldn’t ignore that she’d distinctly heard his voice in her head while they kissed and she finally remembered every bit of the conversation they’d held while he was under Vegre’s spell in the cave. They’d talked about it and both of them had come to the uneasy realization that it had happened. There was simply no way to explain it away. Even if she wasn’t a
Tree spirit
, she was
something
to be able to hear his thoughts.
Unfortunately, while she’d maintained delusions for several hours after getting home of continuing what the kiss promised, reality had wound up far different. Oh, there was sexual tension—no doubt about that. The air had practically crackled every time they were within a few feet of each other.
But Tal had been either unwilling, or
uninterested
, in following through. Yet it hadn’t made her feel dismissed. It had been sort of … comfortable. She’d found it fascinating to watch him working with the opal. To see it used as a
tool
, rather than just a decoration sitting in a drawer, had been awesome.
And he certainly knew his stuff. Now that she understood how to sense it, she could
feel
the magic as he crafted. From putting guard spells on the wall upstairs where the magic portal had appeared, to simply moving her candlesticks around the room, she’d watched it all with growing respect for him.
And the things they’d learned from the scroll! Wow, was that an eye opener. But it wasn’t just the recitation of the events that put Vegre in prison that had held her attention, but Tal’s remembrances of that time. Like the difference between reading a news story in the paper to watching it happen on television, she could almost
see
the medieval world through his words.
“And thus it was ordered that houses of the afflicted should place dark cloths in their windows. The number which complied panicked the lords, for the magic which had served us became our enemy as
Tin Czerwona
laid waste to the guilds.” She remembered him reading from the parchment. He let out a little sniff of derision. “That sounds so simple, doesn’t it? So clean and neat. But it wasn’t.” He paused for a long moment and his eyes glazed over, remembering. “I remember women walking through the frozen mud with reddened, vacant eyes … skirts shredded and flashing their petticoats underneath. Revealing their shame.”
She must have shown her confusion on her face, because he continued. “Oh, yes—
shame.
Average people didn’t have closets of clothing to make hangings from, Mila. Cloth was precious, and all but the very wealthy had just the one outfit. To follow the law, one cloth at least two handsbreadths in width had to be flown for each of the afflicted. There were a lot of big families and eventually even the most skillful seamstresses couldn’t hide the missing cloth. For a woman to show her undergarments was grounds for time in the stocks.” He sighed and shook his head. “But eventually nobody pointed fingers or spoke of punishment because there were no families left to
point
. I was young, you understand, so I had a different view than adults might have had. I remember very clearly the tiny rows of stitches to fix damage after the dead were buried … the patchwork skirts that didn’t quite match. Women would sneak into houses to strip cloth from the dead and dying … risking their lives so their families could retain a little dignity.”
She didn’t even know how to respond to that. Tears had burned her eyes, because as he spoke—some weird part deep inside her
remembered
those people.
“The smell was horrible, wasn’t it?” She wasn’t asking out of curiosity, but in confirmation of the phantom scent that burned her nose.
“Very. We had magic then, enough for all. But it …
permeated
our daily lives. You couldn’t walk the streets for the stench of the dead and dying. And it was far worse once it mutated to infect the humans. Whole cities were laid waste by it. The humans called it the black plague because of how their skin would turn black. but we called it
Tin Czerwona
—red shadow, because of the way our magical aura would corrupt.”
“Red and writhing. I know. I saw it attacking Suzanne, even though I didn’t know what it was then.”
He turned to her with horror etched on his face. “You didn’t mention you
saw
the illness in the girl. How far along was it?”
All she could do was shrug. “I don’t know how far it
can
get, so it’s hard to judge. There were squirming tendrils of red and black. They seemed to come from a bruise on her neck. It was all over her chest. I beat it back a little by rolling eggs on her, but I would have needed a case to get rid of it fully. And the eggs stank when they exploded … filled with a blackish goo.”
“Her
neck,
you say?” He got an odd look on his face and then put the scroll on the floor. Pushing the coffee table aside with one arm, he tossed the bottom roller hard with the other, making it spin across the rug to reveal the entire parchment. He crawled alongside it as it opened, finger tracing back and forth across the carefully inked words. She continued to sit and remain silent, because she didn’t know what he was looking for and it seemed that interrupting would be a bad thing.