The immortals key, p.10
The Immortal's Key, page 10
“That might bother his stomach,” Reg pointed out.
Harrison looked at Starlight, who stared at him, communicating something, then Harrison continued to shred the chicken. “Humans call it death, and yet they talk of life after death. They know that death is not the end of the spirit, that consciousness goes on somewhere else or in a new life, but they still believe it is permanent.” He shrugged as if it were impossible to comprehend such convoluted logic.
Reg had to admit that despite her dedicated non-belief in any mainstream religion or the concept of heaven or reincarnation, she knew that spirits lived on after the death of the body. How else had Norma Jean continued to talk to Reg long after her death? And so many other spirits that Reg had communicated with over the years. The only other way to explain it would be to admit that she was insane and that the voices and visions were just a glitch in her brain, not something that was real and could be explained spiritually.
“And the immortals? How are they different from humans, other than having stronger magical powers?”
“Better fashion sense,” Harrison deadpanned.
He bent down and put the chicken in Starlight’s bowl. Starlight immediately charged in, chawing on the food noisily as if he hadn’t been fed in a week. Reg shook her head. “I need to use the bathroom. Are you going to be here still when I get out?”
“I expect I will.”
Reg wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was probably as clear as Harrison was going to get. “And you understand the part about privacy and not walking in on people or apparating in the room when they are using the bathroom?”
He cast his eyes down like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I will not appear in the bathroom.”
“Good.”
She made quick use of the bathroom in spite of his assurance, not trusting that he would be true to his word. She splashed water on her face and inched the curtain back to peek out the window. It was still early, but it was, at least, light outside. He hadn’t gotten her up in the middle of the night. But just how long had he been sitting on her bed before she had awakened?
She returned to the kitchen. The coffee maker was just finished filling the pot, so she poured a cup for herself and one for Harrison. She handed it to him, but he didn’t take it.
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“Then why did you want to make coffee?” Reg demanded, exasperated.
“You drink coffee.”
“You were just making it for me?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She sipped her coffee, a little mollified. “Well, thank you for thinking of me. Do you want to sit down?” she motioned to the wicker furniture.
He surveyed it for a moment, then nodded, and they both went over to sit. Starlight had finished eating his chicken and followed them over. Rather than joining Reg, he jumped up onto Harrison’s lap, where he received plenty of scratches and snuggles. Reg shook her head at the black hairs collecting on Harrison’s white pirate shirt.
“You have questions for me,” Harrison said abruptly.
Reg tried to avoid rolling her eyes. “I have plenty of questions, but you never seem to answer any of them. You give some vague answer or change the subject.”
“What do you want to know?”
Reg tried to prioritize her questions, suspecting that he would only answer one or two—if she were lucky.
“Who is—or was—Weston?”
He looked at her for a long moment, and she figured he regretted his offer to answer her questions. “Weston is an immortal.”
“I figured that. Is he still…” She hesitated over her wording. Asking whether he was alive or dead would likely result in another philosophical discussion over the meaning of the words. “Is he still here, on the earth, like you are?”
“On the earth… not like me.” Harrison considered, then nodded, looking satisfied with his answer.
It might have made perfect sense to him, but it didn’t tell Reg any more than she already knew.
“He’s on the earth right now.”
“Yes.” He looked as if he would qualify his answer, then shrugged. Reg analyzed his hesitation. Could Weston be on the earth but not on the earth? Maybe, like the pixies, he existed in more than one plane, so that it wasn’t as easy to state what temporal space he occupied. If he even had a physical body. The Witch Doctor and Harrison seemed to be able to materialize at will, and she didn’t know what happened to their bodies when they weren’t visible. Did they occupy only one space? What happened to the matter that made up their bodies when they were not there?
“How is he not here like you?”
“He is… constrained. Not free to come and go.”
“Okay…” That was interesting. “Why did the Witch Doctor want to know where he is? And what does he have to do with me or my mother?”
Harrison petted Starlight and looked down at his face. They seemed to be communicating at a telepathic level, but Reg couldn’t hear whatever it was they were saying. She didn’t like the isolation she felt at not being in on the conversation. It was strange to think that that was how other people felt all the time when she communicated with spirits or telepaths.
“Weston and Destine have been rivals for a very long time. This is not a bad thing in our kind. It creates balance. Keeps one entity from becoming too powerful.”
“But you also said that you are prohibited from harming each other. The Witch Doctor definitely wanted to harm Weston. Even to destroy him.”
Harrison shrugged. “Rules are broken… if we did not have the freedom to break them, they would not be rules. They would be…” he struggled to find the words, “impossibility. But it is not impossible for us to hurt our kind. That is why there must be a rule.”
Reg tried to follow the logic but wasn’t sure she did. “And my mother?”
“It is not against the rules to harm mortals.”
Reg didn’t like to hear that, but it wasn’t what she meant. “I mean… how was she involved in all of this? She wasn’t immortal.”
“No,” Harrison laughed, “certainly not.” He looked down at Starlight and stopped laughing as if he had been reprimanded. “No. But she was a favorite. He gave her his blood.”
Reg pictured some cannibalistic ritual and wrinkled her nose. “Gave her his blood? What does that mean? Did that… give her power?”
“No.” Harrison met Reg’s eyes, his golden brown irises glowing. “He gave her you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Even though Reg had half-expected this ever since the confrontation with the Witch Doctor, it still sent her reeling. She was suddenly lightheaded, bright spots appearing before her eyes. She didn’t want to misunderstand Harrison’s use of the English language. Things didn’t always come out the way he intended them. She could be completely misunderstanding him. Maybe he meant that Weston had protected her at some point. That she had run away or been kidnapped, and he had brought her back. Or that he’d healed her from a potentially fatal illness.
He had given Reg to Norma Jean.
“He was a man,” Norma Jean said in Reg’s head. “Just a man like any other. He didn’t seem that different.”
But he had been, hadn’t he?
“Do you mean… that he’s my biological father?” Reg asked Harrison as calmly as she could.
Harrison scratched his head. “Biological… I am not sure. My kind… it is not the same as when humans meet. But without him, you were not. And with him, you were.”
Reg groaned. She brought her feet up onto the chair, knees tight against her chest. “Don’t tell me that! Then these… gifts that I have? They are from him?”
“They are… part of him.” Harrison pondered. “We don’t know when we create with a human, what will be the result. A child with great powers, or a child with little power at all. When a child is born, there is… a disruption in our order. We can sense it… That is how I knew of your existence and your need for protection.”
“But why would you protect me? If Weston was my father, then wasn’t it his responsibility?”
“He was… gathered in. There is a consequence to creation. He could not be there. But he left no clues to his chosen exile.”
“So the Witch Doctor couldn’t find him.”
“Destine would have if he could. We are vulnerable when in that state. Destine hoped to remove him from this earth. The rest of us watched for him, but Destine was more… dedicated.”
“And he thought Norma Jean would know where Weston went? That he would leave her a trail of breadcrumbs so she could find him again?”
“Breadcrumbs.” His face lit up with a big smile. “What an apt word. For Weston to come back, he would need to be close to his loved one. But Destine was unable to find the trail. He was furious. And he has been searching still, waiting for some sign of Weston’s return.”
Reg shook her head. “And I walked right into him. What are the odds that I would move into the town he was operating out of?”
“Odds?”
“What are the chances that we would run into each other? I managed to lose him all those years ago in Maine. We should never have run into each other again. But then I decide to come to Black Sands because it sounded like a good place to run a con as a psychic. And things would never be the same again…”
“It is not chance,” Harrison said slowly. “It was certainty. You and Destine were both drawn to this place.”
“Why?”
He raised his eyebrows comically high. “Because Weston was here. He left his imprint on the place. It is very faint, so many years later, but not so faint that one of our kind cannot feel it.”
“And me? Do you think I could sense him here too?”
Harrison nodded. “Why else would you come here? Traveling all across the country? Humans like to stay in one place, near their nesting place. They don’t like to go long temporal distances. But you did not stay. You came here when you had no one to help take care of you, no job, no roots. Just… Weston’s imprint.”
“I don’t know.” Reg shook her head. “I know why I came here, and it wasn’t just a feeling that I should. It was a decision based on logic. On trying to earn money to support myself.”
“Humans can work anywhere. You did not have to come to this location to work.”
“Well, no,” Reg agreed. “I have worked in other places, and I move fairly often. But Black Sands seemed like a good place to land. I heard that there were more witches and psychics here than anywhere else in the country. So, of course, I came here.”
Harrison nodded and petted Starlight with long, slow strokes.
“This is crazy. Everyone keeps asking me where I got my talents. And I thought… they were just something I developed to survive. Learning to cold read people. To avoid trouble. How to know when people were telling the truth, and whether they were a danger to me. I needed those things to survive. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a real psychic gift until I moved here. And even now, I don’t understand it and half the time don’t even believe it myself.”
“We have observed that humans who go through hardship develop stronger gifts. Or humans with stronger gifts run into more problems. We don’t know why this is. In some cultures, children are taken away from their families, are put through trials, in order to force the development of their inborn talents.”
Reg remembered Calliopia’s kidnapping and incarceration with the pixies. She remembered Calliopia’s father talking about the ordeal she had been through. Reg had suspected at the time that he had been the one to put her through it, but she couldn’t understand why he would do such a thing. Maybe it had been to force the development of her fairy gifts, to trick her into coming into her powers.
“That’s cruel. I know what it’s like to have to live without parents. No one should ever do that.”
Harrison shrugged as if it were nothing. According to Francesca, immortals didn’t have any feelings for humans, but saw them just as bugs or amusing toys, to play with and discard as they liked. Harrison had been helpful to Reg, and she had good feelings around him, but did he love her like the uncle he had once pretended to be? Did he care how she felt or how she turned out in life? Or was he part of the reason she had gone through so many difficulties, carefully nudging her gifts to blossom, like someone forcing flower bulbs?
Harrison’s eyes roved around the room.
“Why are you really here?” Reg asked suspiciously. “You didn’t come here because you thought I had questions you could answer. You haven’t ever cared about my questions before. You always avoid answering them.”
Harrison gave her a cheerful smile, a mask that covered up whatever his real motives were. He wasn’t easy for her to read, especially since he could block her psychic powers. “Perhaps I wanted to see my old friend again,” he offered, indicating Starlight. He kissed the top of the cat’s head and cuddled him close to his face. Reg found it very uncomfortable to see him doting on a cat like a little child or crazy cat lady. It was nice that he liked cats, but he seemed to like them just a little too much.
“Do you want a cat? We have nine that we are trying to find new homes for.”
He chuckled. “It would not be a good choice for me to provide a temporal home for another creature. Especially a kattakyn.”
Reg watched him as he continued to lavish attention on Starlight. “Did you… know him in another life? Or when he was with another owner?” She had taken his ‘old friend’ as a tongue-in-cheek joke, but maybe it had been accurate. Perhaps he had known Starlight for longer than she thought. They had acted immediately comfortable and friendly with each other from the first time they met.
Harrison looked into Starlight’s face for a moment. “He is a very old, wise soul.”
“So you do know him?”
Reg picked up her coffee cup and sipped the cooling liquid. She really ought to have something to eat before all of the caffeine gave her the shakes. When she looked back at Harrison for his answer to her question, he was no longer there.
Reg spent what felt like hours on the phone with the people at the animal shelter, being passed from one person to another, trying to find out what they knew about Starlight’s history and his previous owner. She would not have been at all surprised to learn that his previous owner had been named Harrison, or some other familiar name. Just how many people had lied to her about the cat’s history? Did anyone at the shelter know that he was psychic? That he was an ancient soul? Reg didn’t even know what that meant, but she felt embarrassed that she had always just treated him like a cat when he seemed to be something more, at least when Harrison talked about him. Corvin had once suggested that Starlight might be a reincarnate, a cat that had been a person in a previous life. But Reg didn’t believe in reincarnation.
Just like she didn’t believe in ghosts or magic. How far had that gotten her?
She remembered the worker at the shelter telling her that Starlight’s previous owner had died, and that was why he had been so depressed and not responded to anyone until Reg’s arrival. He had connected to her like he hadn’t to anyone else. Was that something to do with Harrison? Maybe Reg had been predestined to go to Black Sands and maybe she was supposed to get a cat and be a psychic and whatever else Weston had declared.
She was angry whenever she thought of Weston. Why would he bring a child into the world when it was against their rules and she was bound to live a life of hardship and be on the outside, never belonging? What was the benefit to him? Was he playing with them like pieces on a chess board? Because of what he had done, Norma Jean had been tortured and killed. There had been so many negative consequences; Reg didn’t understand why he would risk it. What was the good of bringing a child into such a world?
She put her phone down on the coffee table, watching Starlight, expecting him to start acting like a person or to be transformed into one in front of her eyes. But he acted just like he always did, finding a bright sunbeam and sitting with one hind leg splayed out while he washed. Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen.
Corvin.
Not phoning her this time, but sending a text message.
How about dinner?
Reg looked at the time and texted him back. Bit early, isn’t it?
She felt guilty as soon as she sent the text. Her answer should have been a resounding no. Or ignoring him. She shouldn’t even consider the proposition. He was too dangerous.
But she wanted to ask him about Starlight and to see what he thought about Harrison’s various claims. Was Harrison leading her on? Seeing what kind of imaginary story he could get her to believe?
Corvin was a historian. He would be able to tell her about the immortals, what the rumors and myths were. And he could tell her why he didn’t like Starlight, and why Starlight didn’t like him. Was the enmity between them more than just that of someone who didn’t like cats?
Corvin’s return text buzzed. Early or late, whatever time you like.
She shouldn’t even be able to receive a text from him. Hadn’t she blocked him from her phone? He must have either changed his number or somehow magicked her phone to change the settings. Maybe that last time he had been there, waiting on the street for her. He’d said that he knew she had blocked him, something that she didn’t think he should be able to tell from his end.
Where? She texted back. Somewhere with people.
It hadn’t stopped him the last time. He had just charmed her into wanting to go somewhere they could be alone. He had convinced her to do things she swore she would not do. But she was stronger now. She had learned how to block him. Most of the time. She was feeling stronger and more sure of herself. And if she had the magic of an immortal, then she should be able to do anything she set her mind on, shouldn’t she?
She was half-expecting him to suggest The Crystal Bowl, since that was where they had met more often than not. He obviously liked it there. And then there was the fancy place that he had taken her the night that he did manage to steal her powers. She wouldn’t want to go back there, though the food had been fantastic. With the way that he had charmed her, she probably would have thought that dirt tasted good.
