Chasing Ghosts
I left the headlights off until I hit the main road—a winding two-lane ripple of blackness—then gunned the engine of the rented Mercedes. Surprised as we lurched onto the pavement, Myrddin raised an eyebrow at me but said nothing. A sound like a mewling kitten rose from the passenger seat. I didn’t know if it was the old man’s stomach or his fear was showing through, but I was already on the verge of rolling down all four windows to air out the vinegar smell of his soiled clothes.
“Take a left up there,” the old man instructed, pointing a gnarled finger to a strip of brown earth ahead and a flourishing field of drooping yellow sunflowers I’d seen earlier in the last rays of sunlight. The head-lights bounced off the stone fences that lined the intersection. “That way leads out,” Myrddin added.
I grunted. How many times had I been here, with and without Caleb? “I know these roads.”
“And I know the ones you don’t know.” Myrddin seemed stronger now than he had in the oubliette or even in the tunnel, as if he’d caught his second wind or was running on willpower alone. I glanced across the seat at him and recognized the excited gleam in his eyes. Damn. Just like me most of the time. Relishing having a purpose.
I nodded to the road as we zipped along. “This one’s faster.”
“It is. But they’ll catch up with you faster, too.” Then a smile played across his thin lips. “Haven’t you ever heard of taking the road less traveled?”
I nodded. Hell of a thing to ask a former English teacher if she’s familiar with a Robert Frost poem or its sentiments. All my life I’d been on the road less traveled, and more than once I’d made my own path, usually not the one I’d intended.
“Then take the next road or Simon and his boys will find us and those artifacts before you reach the next city.”
He had a point. I fishtailed the Mercedes onto the dirt road and bumped along over a wide grass path through the sunflower field. My knee throbbed as I crushed the accelerator to the floor. My ears rang, too, but not as loudly since I’d put the tiles in the trunk. It was more like the barely audible sound of a cheap burglar alarm in a jewelry store.
The kitten sound mewled again from Myrddin’s seat, but he didn’t seem to hear it. Probably a little deaf, I told myself. Poor guy had lived for who knew how long in miserable conditions, half-starved. I’d find a place to get him a loaf of bread or a cup of soup as soon as I felt it was reasonably safe to venture out. For now, we needed to put some serious distance between the Adriano palazzo and us.
Simon had murdered my lover. All these years I’d been allowed to roam the world freely and been very well paid, and I’d thought it was because he favored me. Instead I’d learned that it was so I could lead Max Adriano to others of my kind. Max had had his subordinates, including Simon, give me a long leash instead of killing me, all because they’d been misinformed about how much I knew. And now Simon knew how much I knew. Or how little.
Simon had made it quite clear that I was expendable. If he ever got another chance, he’d kill me.
“You’re distracted,” Myrddin said after what seemed like an hour had passed with me lost in thought.
“It’s been an eventful night. I have a lot to think about.”
“Better if you focus on surviving and stop thinking so hard. You tend to analyze too much.” He said it as if he knew me. Myrddin pointed to where the road vanished into blackness. “Turn up there.” Then he continued, “Sometimes you have no time to study the alternatives, no time to make plans. All you can do is jump.”
I slammed on the brakes and spun the steering wheel hard. When the automobile finished screeching to a halt, I looked out my window and down, a long way down, to where waters dashed over rocks in the moonlight. I let out a frustrated yelp. We’d come damned close to plunging over the guardrail and onto the rocks below.
“I told you, you’re distracted. You’d better get a grip on your emotions. And your first priority, as long as you’ve got those tiles in your possession, is to stay alive. You’re second priority is to make sure Simon never sees that book.”
My chest heaved as I sat gripping the steering wheel. Foam danced over the jagged rocks below. The waves struck earth with a thunder louder than the ringing in my ears. I couldn’t look away. I’d seen my own mortality tonight. Years of hanging from rooftops by a thread, and nothing had ever been as close to the bone as Simon’s notification that I’d be working for him for the rest of my life, however long he chose for that to be. I wasn’t sure that kind of life was worth living. No, I was sure that it wasn’t. Not anymore.
As for my current priorities, my top one wasn’t the tiles or the book. It was Lilah and making sure she never got pulled into my own miserable life.
Several local automobiles passed us, blowing their horns to insult my driving skills. They sped into the night as if their tires knew the road by rote and they weren’t the least bit concerned with the inconsistent lack of a guardrail to keep them from tumbling down onto the rocks.
“Aubrey.”
Myrddin’s voice snapped me backward. “Wh-what?” I shook myself and crawled away from the edge, back onto the road. I waited for another automobile to pass before I maneuvered the Mercedes toward the south.
“Focus,” he warned. “You’re not any good dead.”
I slammed one fist against the steering wheel and kicked at the accelerator. How was I supposed to focus? I didn’t know what to think or how to feel! What the hell was all that about tonight? Simon’s change in attitude toward me, my discovery that my mother had led a secret life, the revelation that my lover had been a hired killer.
“And Cabordes,” I said aloud. “The gun. The disappearing act. What the hell—” I punctuated my profanities with another pound of my fist on the steering wheel “—is going on?”
It was almost as if all my unlucky stars had lined up in one night… or an early midlife crisis of catastrophic proportions had struck. One thing was for certain: my life would never be the same.
Myrddin rolled his eyes. “You either ask too many questions or you ask the wrong questions.” Then he gestured ahead. “Slow down. This road isn’t well marked. And watch where you’re going or you’ll blow out a tire on the decries ahead.”
I swerved to miss the remnants of an automobile accident that had left glass and metal sparkling on the road. A flash of errant meal bumped under my front right tire and clanged under the Mercedes before disappearing in my rearview mirror. “I’m driving,” I reminded him angrily as I took the next curve a little faster than I should have.
“Is that what you call that?”
“If you think you could do a better job—”
“Of course I can do it better. Look at you. You’re letting your anger and your emotions get to you. That’ll get you killed.”
I ignored him and waited for the automobile riding my rear bumper to pass. Just being on this road was a life-or-death choice. The last thing I needed tonight was for someone to lecture me on my emotions, especially the ones I’d always been so good at hiding. I’m a Pisces and I’ll be emotional and dramatic when I damned well feel like it. That’s why it was so important to balance my emotions with so much analysis. Studying the situation, researching, planning—that was my scarecrow, the thing I held up to my fears to frighten them away. That’s how I lived my life. And how I stayed alive. All the planning was absolutely necessary for my heists and had served me well. As for planning my own life, it seldom paid off, but that didn’t stop me. Instead of all the planning, maybe what I really needed was to follow my heart. But I’d lost that opportunity when I’d wedded my life to the Adrianos.
“You’re changing the subject,” I told Myrddin. “We were talking about Cabordes. What’s his deal?”
“You were talking about Cabordes. I was talking about driving. Watch this next curve.” He ground his feet into imaginary brakes. “Slow down!”
I gritted my teeth. I needed to know what was going on. How could I make any plans if I didn’t know anything? “We’re fleeing for our lives, old man. I’m not slowing down. If I do, the locals will run me over.” I shielded my eyes from the next pair of bright headlights coming up quickly behind and prayed the driver wasn’t an Adriano. “I suggest you buckle up.”
“Why? At my age, an automobile crash will kill me anyway. I’m more worried about those artifacts. That manuscript must either be buried where no Adriano will ever find it or it must be destroyed.”
“There’s no way I’m—”
“You don’t need it. Not to find the others. I’ve seen the book. Long ago. I know the family names. I can find them myself.”
He’d seen the manuscript? “What were you? Max’s right-hand man?”
“You need those tiles unbroken, if possible. But even if that’s not possible, you must to keep them away from Simon.”
“Me?”
The road passed in an awkward silence between us.
“You,” he said at last, his voice quiet, almost reverent. “You and all those of your kind. Those tiles are vital to your mission.”
“I don’t have a mission.” What was he talking about? Then again, he was well into his eighties. Maybe his mental faculties had started to erode. “I have back the property that was mine. And a bit more. And that bit more will fetch enough spare change that I can use to change my life.”
Including changing my face and my address to someone and something that Simon would never find. To a face my daughter would never recognize. To something Matthew would never… Ah, Matthew.
“I agree,” Myrddin said, but I wasn’t listening. “You need to change your life, but no amount of money in the world will do it for you. You have to change from within.” He pounded his chest once to emphasize the words and then winced at his own strength.
Matthew, not Myrddin, was on my mind. I blinked back the tears that wanted to come, but I wouldn’t let them. Not now, not ever. The time to cry for Matthew had long passed. He was dead. And according to Myrddin, he had been for more than half my life. And I’d grieved every minute, never ending my grief because I’d never really known for sure.
I sucked in a breath that came out just as ragged and I tried to breathe through the ache in my throat. I should have known all that time ago that he was lost to me, but I’m not a girl who gives up under normal circumstances. Matthew had died protecting me. He’d loved me. But that was all in the past. Right now, the best I could hope for was to stay alive and do whatever I could to protect my daughter from afar so maybe she could find the home and the life and the love that had eluded me.
My mind was a jumble. Myrddin was right about focusing on surviving. Everything else could be sorted out with daylight, provided I lived that long. There were so many things I wanted to ask, and yet Myrddin had insisted I asked too many questions. There was so much I wanted to know! About my mother. About her legacy. About the tiles. About the Joan of Arc manuscript. About Matthew.
Oh, God, about Matthew!
I’d learned everything I knew about him in a three-month span, but a whole lifetime ago. But what did I really know about him? I hadn’t even known who we were hiding from! And how could anyone ever expect me to believe he’d been sent to kill me or that he’d worked for Simon?
Except that I, too, worked for Simon. And I’ve done things that I’m not too proud of, either. Things it’s best Ma Ma did not live to see.
“My mother,” I began, but when I glanced at the old man again, he’d fallen asleep in his seat. I sighed and concentrated on the dark road ahead punctuated by headlights and the edge of the guardrail that sometimes wasn’t there at all. More than two decades had passed, and I still missed my mother as if I’d lost her yesterday. Almost as much as I missed my daughter.
I never let myself think much about my mother. We’d been close, the kind of close I later dreamed of having with my daughter. Losing Ma Ma was something that had still been raw in my blood when I’d met Matthew and he’d whisked me away. I’d felt so alone in the world, with no one to nurture me or protect me, and I’d been overwhelmed by the aloneness. I’d told myself that I’d get over losing her, but I never had, not even after all these years. I never really finished mourning for her either, before there was Matthew to grieve and Lilah to raise and a busy life to occupy my thoughts. Some nights, especially more recent nights when I was with a lover and still felt all alone, I longed to wrap my arms around Ma Ma’s waist and have her pull me to her to be held, just held. More than anything, I missed the weight of her gentle arms around my shoulders.
A fine mist splattered across my windshield as the road seemed to become a bit bumpy. I let Myrddin sleep as I searched for the button for the windshield wipers. By the time I found it, the rain was already peppering down with the ferocity of pebble-size hail and the road was even bumpier than a few seconds before.
I squinted into the rearview mirror. Funny. It didn’t seem to be raining at all behind us. Ahead, water fell out of the sky in sideways sheets, white in my headlights like some kind of translucent force field. I’d never seen anything like it. Almost as if we were entering the outer band of concentric circles and the inner circles were still clear.
Again I glanced at Myrddin. Poor guy. Still sleeping and just deaf enough not to notice the ferocity of the storm. Was he this hard of hearing all the time or was he still suffering from being locked inside a vault of energy that affects the senses? Either way, the old man was obviously exhausted, and frankly so was I. A few times I heard whimpering as he slept. Almost a soft crying.
The front right of the automobile shifted downward with every bump, and I moaned out loud. The debris I’d crushed a few kilometers back must have cut my tire just enough for the air to ooze out over the distance. We needed to keep moving, damn it. The storm flashed jagged bolts of lightning across the night sky, spotlighting the narrow road carved into the cliffside. If we stayed on this course, we might easily find the road washed out ahead or blocked by a small landslide that would leave us stranded and without enough room to turn the automobile around and go back the way we’d come. And going back meant facing an enemy who was, for the moment, stronger than I was. We had to get off this road, and the sooner, the better.
By the time I found a deserted road—a small dirt path already muddy—the rain pelted so hard I couldn’t see beyond the three-pronged hood ornament on the Mercedes. I found a safe spot where I wouldn’t bog down.
For the moment, I felt somewhat safe. We couldn’t drive in the storm, but neither could anyone else. Even with the storm raging outside, I surprisingly managed to doze out of sheer exhaustion. Still, it was that fitful kind of sleep where you jerk yourself awake every few minutes. I dreamed of Matthew and of Ma Ma and of Lilah… and the whole Adriano clan after me, after my daughter, all bent on revenge. I didn’t need a dream to tell me that they’d kill me if they ever saw me again.
Sometime after that, a panicked dream struck that I immediately forgot the plot of but remembered the fear. I opened my eyes wide, blinking at the clear weather and the palest pink hues of sky, signaling the coming sunrise. Myrddin slept peacefully while I slipped out into the morning and quickly changed the tire, muddying my shoes in the process. The sun was higher in the sky by the time I slipped back behind the steering wheel, and I was weary of cursing Mercedes tire jacks.
Myrddin stirred beside me, then startled awake. “Why are we stopped?”
I heard the panic in his voice but stayed calm. My adrenaline rush had crashed and I was tired. “Storm,” I said, yawning. “You missed it.”
“You stopped for a storm?” he asked, incredulous. He stared at me with his gray-stubble-framed mouth open. A greasy wisp of hair hung between his eyes. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Saved our lives? Worst rain I’ve ever seen, second only to the traffic.” I stretched and turned back to Myrddin. I was getting used to the smell of his dirty clothes; my eyes no longer watered. “You didn’t want me to drive off a cliff, did you?”
“Might as well if Simon catches you. It may already be too late.” He frowned at the stone fence beside us, the one made of lava rock that had kept us hidden from plain sight. “It’s lucky for us that they can’t track you in one of these storms. If they could, you’d be dead right now. Don’t you realize that?”
I jammed the keys back in the ignition and twisted. The engine started right away. “I’ll find a way out of here. That’s my specialty—finding a way out.”
“And you’re a little too good at finding ways in. You weren’t supposed to be here at all. We went to a lot of trouble to keep you from leaving San Francisco. You and that manuscript—”
“We?”
“Stop asking questions and drive. Concentrate! You need to get as far north as you can before it starts raining again.”
Uh-oh. We were heading south.
I tilted my head to look out the windshield. Not a cloud in the sky. “I think the rain is over.”
“I said before it starts raining again. The sky may be clear now, but that doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you think it was a little coincidental that a freak rainstorm forced you to stop for the night?”
“Oh, I don’t think…” What was he saying? That the Adrianos had something to do with the sudden bad weather? They weren’t gods, after all. Though Caleb would probably have disagreed with me on that.
“You’ve already been tricked. Simon’s slowed you down. He probably has men scouring the planet right now, looking for you. Satellites, tracking devices. He’ll be looking for those tiles and the manuscript. Aubrey—” the old man grasped my wrist and squeezed. “—whatever you do, you have to get to Paris. To a flat on the Left Bank.”
My old stomping grounds? I’d been there three times in the past six months, mainly to impose on friends for a place to stay for a few days while on my way to a new assignment.
“There’s a woman named Catrina Dauvergne. You have to—”
“Cat?” Speaking of friends I occasionally imposed on. “You know Catrina? She’s a friend of mine.”
Cat was really more acquaintance than friend, but she was as close as I got to anyone. At one point, after a particularly bad night for nightmares around the anniversary of my mother’s death, I’d felt much closer to Cat and after a few glasses of wine I’d confided a few secrets, including my birth name and my identity as an English professor. Now I wondered if that might have been a mistake. Our friendship had cooled a bit over the past year, and I wasn’t sure why. She’d asked a favor of me recently, a problem with an old letter written during the height of the French Revolution, and I’d been satisfied to answer her questions without asking any of my own. She’d given me a place to stay and a friendly smile on a few particularly bad occasions, and I owed her whatever favor she asked.
“It’s not her friendship with you that matters. What matters is that she’s one of your kind. Get the tiles to Catrina,” he reiterated. “The manuscript, too. She’ll help you hide them—and yourself.”
“Do I need to be there today?” Old habits die hard. It was a question I frequently asked with assignments. A train didn’t seem feasible, given the bulk of the tiles in the trunk. And an airport was out of the question. Leaving Italy by plane would be like waving red flags in front of the polizia and begging to be arrested. To keep a low profile and carry that kind of bulk, the best mode of transportation was by automobile. That would take a good day’s drive if I stuck to the Autostrada del Sol. That would take longer, but the rural pathways would be safer for me if I needed to disappear, and I usually did.
“You don’t necessarily have to be there today, but the sooner, the better.” He pulled the door lever and it opened wide.
“You’re not coming with me? Where are you going?”
He flailed one hand toward a small villa ahead, barely visible in the first rays of sunlight. “I have connections. It’s best we separate so you don’t slow me down.”
I rolled my eyes at the old man. Always thinking he could do anything and refusing to consider the possibility that he couldn’t. I liked him for that.
“I have a man on the inside, Aubrey. He has my full authority to do whatever he must and he knows more about you than you yourself know. He’ll know how to delay Simon. I’ll do what I can to give you some time, as well.”
“To get to Cat’s. And she’ll know what to do.”
He nodded. “Right. There are others like you.” He shrugged. “Not thieves but… I need to find them. Quickly.”
“What others? I don’t understand.”
“You’re all descendants of some of the most powerful women in history. A few of you have tried to come together over the centuries. Before, you’ve failed. This time, you can’t let that happen.” He paused for a second, his gaze faraway in the dimness. “It’s a shame that you and Matthew didn’t have a child. It would have been a child of destiny. One under special protection from the higher powers.”
I held my breath and said nothing.
Myrddin stepped out of the automobile, onto the muddy roadside, and then peered back through the open door at me. The words caught in his throat as if he had already decided we’d never see each other again. Then he added, “The child would have had a double blood-line. Matthew, too, was descended from your kind.”
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© 2006 Lorna Tedder. All rights reserved. Free to read here — please don’t repost elsewhere.