Isabelle said, “I’m pleased you consider us your friends.”
Aaron took the bench next to her, and he relaxed, too.
The kitchen was working its magic.
Irving’s mansion was pristine, filled with delicate antiques, polished hardwood floors, and fringed velvet drapes held back with gold cords. So of course, with the possible exception of Isabelle, the Chosen Ones felt woefully out of place.
Consequently they’d moved their group meetings to the kitchen, a huge, warm, cavernous room on the bottom floor of the mansion, where they could easily access the refrigerator for Cokes, the freezer for Popsi cles, and the stove for toasted cheese sandwiches. The floor was below ground level, the ceiling above, and when they sat around the massive, heavy table, they saw the legs of pedestrians as they walked by.
McKenna and Martha hated having the Chosen invade their domain.
The Chosen loved it, especially when McKenna and Martha did as they were doing now and rushed to create food for the triumphant homecoming.
In a suitably deferential voice, McKenna asked, “Would Mr. Eagle and Dr. Hall like a beverage? I would be pleased to serve our returning heroes.”
By that, everyone else knew they would have to serve themselves. They hurried to grab something to drink; then chairs scraped as they found their places around the table.
Aaron accepted a cup of coffee, took a long breath of air scented with freshly baked bread and a beef roast cooking in the oven, and knew a vast gratitude that he had returned to his friends, and more important, that he had returned at all.
When the Chosen Ones were settled, Caleb asked, “What happened? Sam, how did you get them out?”
“By the time I got to police headquarters, the cops had fingerprinted two of the guys on the floor and found out they were known assassins. That helped. It also helped that Fujimoto Akihiro was there, with his fingerprints all over a priceless samurai sword stolen last night from a collector here in New York City, and that Fujimoto had been at Louis Fournier’s party. So the investigators had already deduced that Fujimoto, not Rosamund, had ordered Fournier’s murder.” Samuel smirked. “At least, it didn’t take much prompting from me for them to have already deduced it.”
“Very slick.” Caleb approved.
Isabelle nodded, and for the merest second, Aaron thought he saw pride on her face.
“Tell them about Lance Mathews,” Aaron said. “Now
that’s
a story.”
“Lance Mathews? The Other who wanted a date with Rosamund?” Jacqueline asked.
“He’s the one. He managed to track us through Casablanca and Paris with the slimy little trick of having Rosamund text him her agenda,” Aaron told them.
“I’m
sorry
.” Rosamund spread her hands in apology.
“Not your fault.” Aaron had no excuse for that kind of carelessness, and he knew it. “I should have thought to ask you about him, instead of assuming that you’d be focused only on me.”
“Ego will get you every time.” Samuel laughed shortly. “Apparently, in the library while Lance Mathews was getting ready to fry Aaron, Rosamund decked him with something called a stela—”
“An irreplaceable pre-Columbian stone tablet,” Aaron filled in. “She knocked him out cold and ruined his pretty face.”
“All right, sister!” Charisma offered a high five.
With her good arm, Rosamund clumsily slapped Charisma’s hand. It was probably the first high five she’d actually exchanged in her whole restricted life.
“When Lance woke up, he was on the library floor, and the police were taking us away in cuffs. Nobody was paying a bit of attention to him, and he staggered to his feet and came running at Rosamund, screaming that he’d get her.” It was a sight Aaron would never forget—that bloodied, broken face contorted with rage, the police so complacent about the crime scene they didn’t react in time. “He was reaching for her. I thought he had her.” Aaron looked around expectantly.
“And?” Isabelle prompted.
“And he dropped dead at her feet.”
“Why?” Caleb asked.
“Heart attack,” Aaron said.
“Really.” Irving didn’t sound as if he believed it.
Aaron didn’t believe it either. It was too convenient for the Others. The guy who had screwed up his mission was gone.
But possibly it wasn’t a bad thing, either. Unless the Others already had someone lined up to take Lance’s place, they were now down a man, too. Six Chosen against six Others. Aaron liked the odds balanced.
Taking care not to touch her sling or her shoulder, he embraced Rosamund. “I have asked Rosamund to marry me.”
“Yay!” Charisma threw her arms in the air and bounced in her chair. “I knew it would happen. I knew it!”
“I recognized the way you were watching her—frustrated and hungry.” Caleb cuddled Jacqueline to his side. “I know the feeling.”
“You were never frustrated,” Jacqueline retorted. “And if you were, it was your own fault.”
“No wonder you look like shit, Aaron.” Samuel looked amused. “Any sensible woman should beat you up for suggesting she spend her life with you.”
“She hasn’t agreed.” In fact, Rosamund had looked horrified when he asked. “But I’m confident I can convince her.” Although first he had to figure out why, when she said she loved him, she was balking about making vows.
Personally, pinning her down with marriage was all he could think about.
“Aaron and Rosamund,” Irving began, “I feel as if I speak for everyone here, Jacqueline and Caleb, Isabelle, Charisma and Samuel, McKenna and Martha, and of course myself, in saying that we’re delighted that you’ve returned to us relatively unharmed and without a felony record. It’s moments like this that make me proud to be part of the Chosen Ones support group.” Without pause, he snapped, “Mr. Faa, please stop rolling your eyes.”
Samuel scrunched down in his chair like a scolded child.
Apparently the list of Chosen present set off a light-bulb in Rosamund’s brain. She looked around the kitchen, then asked, “Excuse me, Irving, but where’s Aleksandr?”
“Aleksandr has been spending a lot of time at the university. I believe he’s getting quite a reputation for successfully tutoring students in calculus. Now.” Impatience almost steamed off Irving’s lean form. “May I continue?”
Aaron leaned close to Rosamund. “He gets cranky when we interrupt his speeches.”
“I noticed,” she murmured back.
Clearly irritated, Irving asked, “Aaron! Rosamund! Is it possible to get a report on your success in searching for the prophecy?”
Aaron hated to announce the bad news. “No prophecy. We were chasing the wrong black slave prophetess from the wrong white house.”
Faces fell around the table.
“But I saw her,” Jacqueline insisted. “I saw her. She was dark-skinned. She worked in the fields. There were jungles all around. She had a vision, and they took her in chains to a tall white house. . . .” Her voice trailed off as she tried to pin down the details.
“What went wrong?” Irving asked.
Aaron took Rosamund’s hand, and held it, and together they led the Chosen Ones step-by-step through Casablanca, through Paris, and finally to the Sacred Cave in the French Alps.
“The cave was as it always was, glowing, speaking in the voice of the wind, and greedy for my blood.” As Aaron spoke, the memories grew vivid—of the glowing rocks, the breeze that taunted and danced, and the giant boulders that would have taken Rosamund’s life. He broke out in a cold sweat.
Now Rosamund grasped his hand tightly. “We entered. I used Bala’s Stone to read the prophecy, and the prophetess said she had seen us coming and deliberately led us astray, knowing that would put us in danger—because she was one of the Others.”
No one moved.
Then Charisma said, “What a hag.”
“Not the word I would have used,” Aaron said.
“I know, but Irving doesn’t like me to use vulgar language. He thinks women who have purple hair and dog collars need to have a care what they say.” Charisma seemed totally unoffended. “He’s probably right.”
Irving accepted a cup of coffee from McKenna and toasted Charisma.
“But what happened to you two?” Caleb asked. “You didn’t get those bruises from finding the wrong prophecy.”
“You’re going to have to get the rest of the story from Rosamund, because the last thing I remember”—the fear for Rosamund and the anguish of knowing he could not save her were burned onto Aaron’s memory—“is seeing the cave collapse.”
Every head turned to Rosamund.
“He was killed protecting me.”
Every head turned back to Aaron.
Isabelle sat on the other side of Aaron. Leaning over, she picked up his wrist. “He looks a little pale,” she told Rosamund. “But he seems to have a pulse.”
“He was dead.” Rosamund sounded calm, interested, like a scientist reciting the results of an experiment. “I am sure. I held his body while it grew cold.”
Everyone in the kitchen shifted uncomfortably.
Still in that calm voice, Rosamund continued. “The paramedics, or whoever they are in France, must have felt the rumbling in the earth. Or maybe they always expect disaster when someone finds the cave, but they showed up with stretchers, one for him and, I guess, one for me.”
“You weren’t hurt at all?” Isabelle leaned around Aaron to watch Rosamund with a worried frown.
Aaron thought he knew what it was. During Rosamund’s sojourn in Irving’s library, the women had grown to know her. Now something about her had changed. Her expressive, mobile face seemed more mature. She no longer waved her hands to punctuate her points, and maybe that was because her shoulder hurt, but he didn’t think so. Rosamund had changed. Sometime between the beginning of their journey to Casablanca and this moment, she seemed to have lost something precious—her unquestioning trust that something wonderful was about to occur.
“No. Aaron protected me with his body, or rather with the dark mist he becomes when he”—Rosamund caught her breath as if remembering that time in the closet—“when he works.”
Aaron picked up her hand. Her fingers were cold, almost as if she had died, too.
“Dr. Servais confirmed Aaron had died of his injuries—”
Irving interrupted. “Servais? Female, short, broad in the beam, abrupt in manner?”
“Yes, that’s her,” Rosamund confirmed. “Although she wasn’t abrupt right then. She was very kind about Aaron, and very firm about me needing to return here.”
Irving exchanged a look with Martha. “She’s a former Chosen, very gifted in healing, but argumentative and assertive.”
“For a woman, you mean?” Jacqueline asked coolly.
Irving didn’t seem to catch her point. Maybe he really didn’t. Maybe he figured that at his age, he could be a chauvinist if he chose. “Servais was very unfeminine. She returned to France—she disagreed with my insistence that we keep on budget—and we haven’t heard from her in years. I wonder what she’s up to.”
“She has become a doctor, an amazing doctor,” Aaron told him. “And . . . well, I don’t know what else she is. As you say, she is very gifted.”
Rosamund turned to Aaron, and again with that scientific note of inquiry in her voice, she asked, “Can you tell us what happened?”
Aaron spoke to her and her alone, weighing her reactions, trying to understand her. “I . . . my being . . . was in the depths of the Sacred Cave.” He heard her inhale sharply, saw her face twist with . . . what? Anguish? Guilt?
Then her face smoothed again, and she became Rosamund, the analytical listener. “How did you know you were in the depths of the Sacred Cave? Have you been there before?”
“No, but my first breath was taken in the Sacred Cave, and I recognized the smell of molten rock and death. I remembered a death and I knew it was me who had died. I was stretched out on my back. I couldn’t open my eyes. Outside the chamber, I could hear this horrible gibbering and howling.” His mouth dried with remembered fear. “I was afraid of whatever that was, wherever it was. It wanted me, and I was helpless.” He glanced around.
Charisma’s eyes were full of tears. Jacqueline had both fists up to her mouth. Isabelle had her head turned away as if she wanted to escape, and the men were pale.
Rosamund was stoic.
“Inside the chamber with me, I could hear this woman arguing in French. I’m not sure who she was—someone very brave to have accompanied me so far.”
“Was it Dr. Servais?” Rosamund asked.
“Maybe. But the chamber was huge. Her voice echoed and rolled.” He shook his head. “I can’t be sure.”
“I think it must have been her.” Rosamund sounded thoughtful, logical. “Because . . . well, please finish, Aaron.”
“Thank you.” When had Rosamund grown so serenely polite? “I don’t know who the woman was arguing with, because I never heard anyone answer, but she was giving him hell.” He winced at his own idiom. “She said the sacrifice had been made, the terms of the deal satisfied, but the sacrifice of my life for Rosamund’s had to be weighed in the balance. No one answered, at least not that I heard, but finally, she said,
‘Bon! C’est fini.’
And I opened my eyes, and I was in this room over the top of the tap house at Sacre Barbare, with Dr. Servais leaning over me giving me—” He stopped himself. “She was haranguing me for going up to the Sacred Cave when she had told me not to. She said lots of people managed to ignore the call of the cave until the end of their lives, and she said it would be wise if I stayed out of the deep places of the earth from now on.”