Cloak of Shards, page 14
That, I feared, was all we could do. Every police officer within fifty miles had seen Cortez’s picture, and they would be watching for him. Owen had given his men instructions to call in any sightings of Cortez but not to engage him. Regular police officers would be no match for an officer of the Wizard’s Legion – and whatever Cortez had become in the last two hundred years had likely put him far beyond the powers of a normal soldier of the Legion.
Those elaborate summoning circles he had left behind proved that beyond all doubt.
Neil and Alex took Nora and Simone to get a rental car. I hadn’t known this until I spent all summer hunting with the Shadow Hunters, but the Family had standing contracts with all the car rental places through one of their front companies. Given how often they traveled, I imagined it came in handy.
I watched them drive off and closed the garage door behind them, and realized that for the first time in over a month, Riordan and I were alone together.
I turned and headed back into the kitchen. Riordan stood at the central island, cleaning up the last of the sandwich wrappers and sweeping them into the trash. I was so happy to see him that a lump rose in my throat, and other feelings began intruding in my thoughts as I remembered some things that we hadn’t done in a month.
“I have to ask you something,” I said. “I…feel really strange asking it, but I know I promised to always tell you the truth, and it only seems fair…”
He stopped cleaning up and looked at me. “Of course.”
I forced the words through my dry throat. “Did you sleep with Simone?”
He didn’t look away. “Yes.”
My heart dropped into my stomach, and my whole body seemed to clench up. We hadn’t been apart that long, had we? Long enough that he had forgotten about me and gone to Simone? Or maybe I had done something to upset him. Maybe he had decided that we were a poor match for one another, that he wanted to be with someone like Simone, someone taller who could discuss literature and art and all that other crap that bored me…
He let out a long sigh. “It was twenty-five years ago now, come to think of it.”
Twenty-five years?
Suddenly I felt like an immense fool. Of course Riordan hadn’t cheated on me with Simone. The man had put himself through hell to save my life. I couldn’t blame him for what he had done before we had met, could I? Hell, my one lover before Riordan had been Nicholas Connor, who had tried to nuke New York, so I couldn’t exactly throw stones. I knew that Riordan had been married before me and had one other long-term relationship, and he had been with a few other women briefly. Simone must have been one of them.
Riordan leaned against the island. “It was right after Nora joined the Family. Right after Sasha.” A Shadowmorph could bestow strength and speed at the cost of a constant hunger for life force. Shadow Hunters had to be disciplined to control that hunger because if they succumbed to it, they became insane serial killers. “What happened with Sasha, Nadia…that messed me up. Badly. I was a wreck for a while, and Simone and I had been friends for a long time by then. She would tell me that what happened with Sasha, what I had to do to stop her, hadn’t been my fault.” He shrugged. “Sometimes, she would make me believe it. Other times we would drink too much wine and then…other things would happen.”
“Yeah,” I said. I was shaking a little and hugged myself to make it stop.
“I…are you all right?” said Riordan. “You looked like someone just punched you in the stomach.” He took a step toward me. “I…ah. You thought I slept with Simone while we were in the UK.” He said it calmly, but I caught the flash of hurt in his eyes for just a second until he controlled it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t really think that. I just…you got off the plane, and she was standing so close to you. And I missed you so much, and the last month really sucked, and I don’t think I’m thinking clearly, and…”
I was babbling, and I couldn’t make myself stop.
“It’s okay,” said Riordan, and he drew me into his arms. I hugged him back, probably hard enough that it was uncomfortable, and rested my head against his shoulder. “I was going to tell you about Simone, but there was a lot going on. But maybe I should have…”
“No, no,” I said, stepping back and rubbing the heels of my hands over my face. “All those people on the plane. Stopping that from happening again. That’s more important.”
“You’re more important to me,” he said, putting his hands on my arms. “If you don’t want us to do this…”
“No. No,” I said. “I couldn’t live with myself if more people got killed when I could have stopped it.”
“You’ve had a bad time of it since I left for the UK,” said Riordan. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Yes. But not yet. I’m so damned tired of talking,” I said.
He smiled. “So what should we do instead of talk?”
In answer I leaned up and kissed him, hard. One thing led to another after that. We got so carried away that we didn’t even make it upstairs. But that was all right. We were alone, and there was a reason I hadn’t installed security cameras inside the house.
After I finally wore him out, we sprawled on the floor of the dining room. We had left a trail of clothing leading back to the kitchen. Riordan lay on his back, and I rested against him, head on his chest, one leg flung over him.
“Oh,” I said when my brain started to settle. “That was nice.”
“I missed you, too,” said Riordan, and he kissed me. He glanced past my shoulder. “I think we sweated enough that we’re going to have to wash that wall.”
“Eh.” I shrugged. “It didn’t seem fair to make you hold my entire weight the entire time.”
“You’re not that heavy.”
“What a sweet thing to say.” I let out a breath. My mind felt clearer than it had in quite some time. “So. Here’s what I did.”
I told him about Armand Boccand, Victoria, and the strange dagger with the map on the blade, and then about everything that had happened in Red River. He listened in silence, and the retelling took long enough that I started to get a little chilly. Turns out that lying naked on the dining room floor isn’t the best way of staying warm.
“You realize that all those people in Red River are alive because of you?” he said. I felt him tense a little beneath me. “I should have been with you. Instead, I wasted a month wandering in circles around the UK trying to find that cult, only to stumble across their bodies once Cortez killed them all.”
“If you hadn’t done that,” I said, “then we’d have no warning at all when Cortez showed up and started killing people. Owen and his detectives would be trying to find out what the hell happened.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, we’ll find him and put a bullet through his head,” I said. I paused. “Do you mind if we get dressed? I’m getting cold.” I grinned. “Unless you’re ready to go again.”
“That will be later,” said Riordan, smiling back. “And we’ll make it up to the bedroom for that. I hadn’t realized how uncomfortable the floor is in here.”
I climbed off him, and we got to our feet and began collecting our clothing.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. Riordan nodded. “Why aren’t you with Simone? I mean, I’m not mad about or jealous or anything. From your perspective, it would have been before I was born.” Thanks to the time distortion effect of the Eternity Crucible, I was decades older than Riordan despite having been born almost seventy-five years after him. “But…you really have a lot in common. You’re both Shadow Hunters, she’s a professor, you write books.”
Riordan considered his answer as he picked up his boxer shorts. My gaze lingered as he pulled them up legs heavy with muscle, and I was disappointed at the sudden reduction in the view. Focus, Nadia.
“We do have a lot in common,” he said at last, locating his trousers. “And she has been a very good friend for a long time, and we’ve survived some dangerous situations together. But we have some serious disagreements.”
“Like what?”
“She doesn’t believe in monogamy, for one.”
I blinked. “Like…she has multiple lovers at once?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Riordan. “You know that bearing a Shadowmorph brings increased…drives, shall we say.” Having just enjoyably experienced those drives, I knew that firsthand. “It also means we don’t age nearly as fast as normal humans, and we can’t transmit disease or have children. Simone says the whole point of marriage is to have children and grow old together. Since that isn’t an option for Shadow Hunters, she doesn’t think monogamous relationships are psychologically healthy for us.”
I frowned, my clothes forgotten. “So she’s like Alex, then? Seducing a new partner every week?”
“Not quite as bad as Alex.” Riordan tucked his shirt back into his trousers and retrieved his jacket. “I suppose Simone is more like a serial monogamist. She’ll have intense, short-term relationships and then break them off. She says it’s our nature as Shadow Hunters – attachments will only weigh us down. Better to remain alone and ready to hunt the creatures of the Shadowlands at a moment’s notice.”
“You don’t agree?” Which I concede was a stupid question, considering we were married and standing in the house we owned together.
“No.” He pulled his jacket back on, frowning as he did when he thought of the past. “Nadia, what I wanted, what I really wanted when I was a young man…I wanted a family. A wife that I could make the queen of my life. I thought that was Miranda. It wasn’t.” Given that Miranda had joined the Rebels and tried to murder him to prove herself to her new friends, I would agree. “I thought it was Sasha. It wasn’t, either. After Sasha…I basically gave up. I spent my time working for the Shadow Hunters and writing books, and that was it.” His eyes met mine. “And then I met you. After the Archon attack on Milwaukee, I thought I would never come back, but you gave me your phone number…and I decided to take a chance.”
“I remember.” I had been attracted to him from the first day we had met, though I had suppressed that feeling for fear of what might happen. That Morvilind might kill me, or Russell might die. Then Riordan had come through for me when I had really, really needed him, so I had decided to take a chance as well, giving him my phone number and telling him to call me the next time he was in town.
A lot had happened since then.
“But it was you,” said Riordan, voice quiet. “It wasn’t Miranda, and it wasn’t Sasha. It was you all along. It just took me a long time to find you.”
“You’re going to make me cry if you keep talking like that,” I said.
I stepped over and hugged him long and hard again.
At last, we broke apart.
“I love you, Nadia,” said Riordan. “Until the day I die.”
“And I love you, too,” I said. “Until the day I die…and let’s hope those days are a good long way off in the future yet.” I wiped at my eyes. “Ah, damn it, you really are going to make me cry if you keep talking like that.”
I stepped back and smiled up at him.
“And if you keep standing there like that,” murmured Riordan, “you’re going to make me change my mind about getting dressed.”
“What?” I said, and then I realized that I had gotten so distracted by the conversation that I hadn’t finished getting dressed. “Oh. Right. Well, if you’re up for it, we could move to the living room and then work our way up to the bedroom one room at a time.”
Riordan laughed.
I felt a lot better than I had since I had left for Florida at Tarlia’s command.
I tried to ignore the little dark voice that whispered that the feeling wouldn’t last.
***
Chapter 10: The New Age
It was about 10 PM, and the Sleeper was in a bar near the Great Gate complex when he saw his picture on TV.
Using the Occlusion spell, he had stolen some more money from a bank in Wauwatosa and hired a taxi to take him to the edge of the Gate complex. Once again, the Sleeper had spun a tale of a foreign businessman visiting Milwaukee, and the taxi driver accepted it without question. Evidently, that had become a common enough occurrence over the last year.
From there, the Sleeper had examined the Gate complex.
Frankly, the entire thing reminded him of a busy international border crossing, albeit one that had been constructed in a hurry. The Great Gate had opened in a field a bit west of Milwaukee but north of the interstate. I-94 was being expanded, and a massive twelve-lane freeway had been constructed to go north from I-94 to the Gate complex. Long lines of trucks headed both north and south, with finished goods and products going to Kalvarion and produce and raw materials coming from the Elven homeworld. Tarlia had apparently launched a massive program to rebuild Kalvarion from the ravages of the Archons.
Admirable, but futile.
When the Sleeper finished his work, mankind and Elves would become gods, and no one would have any more need of money, or indeed of food and drink.
The rest of the Gate complex resembled a sort of combination of a port and a massive truck stop. Vast concrete yards held containers waiting to be loaded onto trucks. There were six enormous diesel stations, each one with its own convenience store so truckers could buy snacks, soda, and sandwiches before continuing to Kalvarion to make their deliveries. The Sleeper had to admit he found the thought of a human trucker driving a big rig across Kalvarion while eating potato chips was incongruous.
He paid close attention to the security around the Great Gate. It seemed that traffic control, customs, and law enforcement were provided by the Gate Police, a law enforcement entity that had spun out from the ongoing dissolution of Homeland Security. A contingent of the Wizard’s Legion was stationed on-site in case of raiders from the Shadowlands, but overall, the Sleeper did not think the Gate well-defended.
Not from someone like him.
Of course, the Gate Police didn’t know that he was coming, so how could they defend against him?
Still, the Sleeper had spent enough time in various military organizations to know that battle was fundamentally an unfair enterprise. It didn’t matter how hard you worked, how extensively you trained, or how diligently you prepared.
What mattered was who won.
The Sleeper stole a phone from the pocket of a trucker standing in line to buy cigarettes and walked until he came to a bar. The clientele was mostly truckers, middled-aged and a bit thick around the middle from the long drives and the bad food. A woman in denim shorts, a cowboy hat, and a tight plaid shirt rolled up to expose a smooth midriff stood on a stage near the bar, playing her guitar and singing a song about a man who had lost his girl, his truck, and his dog all on the same day.
He ordered a drink and settled in a corner to use the Internet on the phone and to watch the news. Back in his day, the Inquisition and the authorities had been adept at slanting the news coverage. They had realized that some events were simply too big to cover up, so they had grown skilled at spinning the accounts. A near-fought battle wasn’t a barely averted disaster, it was a masterful strategy executed by Elven lords loyally serving the High Queen.
Flight 997 was in the news, but the deaths had been presented as the result of a loss of atmosphere aboard the plane. The Sleeper searched the news sites for the address where he had killed that unlucky young woman. Her body had already been discovered. Her name had been Melissa Hurt, and the news claimed that she had been killed by an unknown assailant. Police urged anyone with information to come forward.
The Sleeper discarded the phone in the trash can in the men’s room and returned for another drink.
There had been no mention of the summoning traps he had left behind. He had to assume that meant someone with the necessary skill to dispel them had been on the scene. That meant a powerful Elven noble, or maybe a Knight of the Inquisition. Or perhaps one of Tarlia’s own shadow agents. Back in the Sleeper’s day, Tarlia had sought out human men and women of particular magical power and recruited them into her service.
Perhaps one of them was on his trail.
No matter. They wouldn’t be able to stop the Sleeper before he was ready to strike.
He lifted the bottle of beer to his lips and drank. Milwaukee, he had to admit, did brew excellent beer. Alcohol could no longer affect the Sleeper, and he had no need for mere physical sustenance. And while he had always preferred wine, he did appreciate good beer when it crossed his path.
