When someone’s lifetime spans longer than a hundred years, it’s wise to remember that moral compasses get a little skewed along the way. Fundamental beliefs shift away from those of the mundane, the short-lived. Longer views see far more than a short-term mind was ever intended to encompass. After a decade or so, what was important in the double digits seems trivial.
When someone has spent the better part of their life lying to someone else, that lie becomes fundamental.
The truth might set you free, but it may also break everything.
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The morning came and went without fuss. I was in the office with time to spare, and Ravenswing was present as well. He was congenial enough that even Caroline had to wonder at the odd experience of having Valen Ravenswing almost smile at her in greeting. Rumor flew around the office that he’d spent the night with a woman, and while I knew better, I decided to let that rumor live. Personally, I figured he’d run over someone’s beloved pet dog on the way in this morning.
On top of being genuinely creeped out by the almost unnatural way that Ravenswing was acting, I was avoiding any thought of dealing with Suzu or Xelander. If I’d had my preferences, I’d have headed to London for a week and put in some facetime with the Home Office. I needed to do it anyway, and the thought that I might get away with it had occurred, considering Ravenswing’s mood.
I didn’t ask, though, because I knew it would only be a form of running away, and I needed to stop doing that. Suzu had often enough taken me to task for running away from my problems, and I was trying to take it to heart. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.
“Mister Shestin, I have a call for you… it is Doctor Wexforth. Would you like to take it, or are you out of the office?” Caroline knew that things weren’t entirely easy between myself and Xelander, for I’d told her to hold his calls if he called me, but it seemed that my brother was more insistent than I was.
“I’ll take the call. Put him through and hold all other calls until I let you know otherwise.” I knew this wasn’t going to be anything enjoyable, and I was glad that Caroline had waited until after lunch to tell me that he kept calling.
That line dropped, and then I heard the new line open, and then Xelander spoke quietly. “Teimhean?”
“Sorry about yesterday, I had an assignment that I just couldn’t get away from. Eight-year-old girls are terribly difficult to entertain… did you know that there are at least six variations of the game Go Fish?” I could tell he wasn’t expecting such a glib response, and I continued. “Well, I do… and I rather suspect that she was a thoughtmage, too. She knew which card was where and I’ve never had the experience of being trounced at a child’s game quite so roundly in my life.”
“That would be because you fail to see it from the eyes of a child, Teimhean,” Xelander’s voice was patient. “A child’s mind is more elastic, and they often see things far better than you or I ever could. Faster to grasp new concepts and theories; the child’s mind has all the proverbial doors open. We train them to close those doors and see things only in black and white instead of the natural grey that they are. Whose child were you keeping after?”
It was so perfectly timed that my reply escaped before I could contain it. “Vanessa Ravenswing.” I paused, winced, and continued. “Yes, Ravenswing’s daughter. Precocious little girl with a wit equal to mine, I fear. She’ll be a terror in a few more years. Once she starts puberty, I daresay the city might not be safe.” Or big enough. “But never mind that, we need to talk.”
Silence fell, dampening the moment that I had carefully built up with my banter, but it wasn’t as crushing as it could have been had I not started on a high note. “Let’s say… six, at the Italian place on the corner of Market and Church?”
“Why not the Bell Tree?”
Oh, so many reasons. “Just trust me, Xelander. Right now, it wouldn’t be a good idea. Not until you know a few things.” Such as the fact that his magic opposed her nature and that if I got in the crossfire, it could end very badly for all of us. He also deserved the knowledge of what I was. “Actually, better yet, let’s make it my place. I’ll bring food in and meet you there at six.”
At least in my townhouse, he could rant and fury all he wanted and there wouldn’t be any risk of an innocent party getting involved. It wasn’t like he could kill me. He sounded confused, but in time, he’d understand. And then, if he wanted nothing further to do with me… I’d not blame him in the slightest.
After hanging up with Xelander, I checked in with Caroline and informed her that I would be offsite for a few hours. It wasn’t a particularly busy day, and that would allow me to get downtown to the Lockwood Police Station and take care of the remains of my car. She agreed to take whatever messages she could and transfer calls to my cell phone as necessary.
It took me almost half an hour to get to the station, and then I had to wait for Kelly to get free. That gave me enough time to compose my thoughts and build the superficial thought-net that would keep him from overhearing anything important going on in my head. He greeted me, shook my hand, and while I tried not to let that unbalance me, I walked with him across to the back of the building and followed him around to the impound lot behind the station.
My Civic was a complete loss. When Kelly had called me, he’d mentioned the fact that if it was viable, it had been stripped, but somehow that hadn’t prepared me for the hard reality. Everything remotely usable had been removed – apart from the ancient tape player. He offered me a sympathetic smile and a copy of the police report, which I would need if I wanted to file with my insurance company. I wasn’t certain it would be worth it, as the value of the Civic before it had been stolen was so low that South Carolina almost paid me to keep it licensed and on the road.
I gave the car a fond farewell, signed it off as a loss and gave Kelly authorization to have it taken off as scrap. Damn it, that meant I had to go car shopping. I couldn’t keep renting and given that I lived in Downtown Charleston and worked in North Charleston, I needed to have a car. With that glum thought in mind, I left Lockwood Station and headed back up the interstate to Ravenswing Corporation.
When I got back to the office, I handled a few emails and messages that were waiting for me, and while I was on hold with one company, I browsed a few car sales websites. Nothing truly caught my eye, and I wondered what Xelander had purchased. Knowing him, it was probably something sensible and understated with impossibly perfect gas mileage and a performance record that ranked in the top twelve. I didn’t want sensible or understated; I was neither of those myself.
Five in the afternoon found me leaving the office and heading down to pick up the order that Caroline had placed earlier. Quarter of an hour later, I was unloading food from my car and setting up the dining area in my townhouse. Just shy of ten minutes after that, Xelander was standing in my dining room, looking at the controlled chaos of a meal preparation.
At six feet even, Xelander stood only an inch taller than me, and he was broader of shoulder, though not terribly overpowered. I’d not have said that he was a large man, but that his presence gave him the appearance that he was much larger than he was.
He had a striking gaze; ice blue eyes that changed with his mood and the ambient light, at times seeming storm-shaded, and at others as clear as an iceberg in the sea. They helped offset the paleness of his silver hair, and he was the only man I had ever known who could keep that hair nearly to his waist and not be accused of being feminine. He wore it in the style of old, the length drawn back and tied at the nape of his neck. It wasn’t your standard medical fare, but I hadn’t noticed anyone actually… noticing.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
As striking as Xelander’s appearance was, he seemed to go to great lengths to be as unobtrusive as possible. He spoke in a quiet cultured voice with a shaded accent that spoke of somewhere in Eastern England, though to an untrained ear, the subtlety of the accent would be lost.
And while I was standing there musing on his appearance, he’d been talking to me. I had not one damned idea what he’d said, and reflexively, said the first thing that came to my brain. “Huh?” Only after I’d said it did some sadistic little part of my brain repeat everything he’d said in a quick mental rundown of the singularly one-sided conversation: he’d wanted to know why I’d insisted on meeting here. “Oh. Well, like I said before, I thought it would be wiser to meet here. And just for the record, because I know the door was locked, how in the hell did you get in here?”
There was that ghost of a smile on his lips, and that light blue gaze glittered at me. “The same way I arrive anywhere else I go, Teimhean: through the front door.”
“I locked that gods-damned door, and you can’t tell me otherwise, Xelander,” I replied. “And unless I miss my mark, which I don’t, the door is still locked. So I repeat: How in the hell did you get in here?”
“I opened the door, Teimhean. Locked or not, the door opened.”
I could add yet another ability to the list of curious talents Xelander exhibited, good. Perhaps one day I would be able to add that up and come up with a silver haired pain in my ass of a brother. “Right, fine. You walked in through the locked front door. Get your ass over to the table then, and let’s eat before the food gets any colder.”
After a moment of consideration, Xelander walked across the townhouse and rested a hand on the back of one of the dining chairs. “I surmise that whatever you feel that we must talk about revolves around Suzu Lachlallan, or you would have been reasonably fine with us eating at the Bell Tree.”
“Actually, in part. But only a small part. There’s a lot to talk about, and I really ought start at the beginning, but I’m being a bad host. What can I get you to drink?”
“Water is fine.”
Either he truly only drank water, or he didn’t trust me. Either way, I snagged two bottles of water from the refrigerator and glasses with ice. He could choose how to drink it himself, which appeared to be uncapping the bottle and pouring it over the ice.
Once I reminded him again to sit, he did so, and I followed suit. There wasn’t any meat in the selection of Italian that I had brought in, so there wasn’t any awkward shuffling of dishes round the table. That made it easier because I wanted to make sure we’d had some food to offset the discussion.
It was another fifteen minutes before either of us spoke, and it was I who had to break the vaguely uncomfortable silence. “Okay. Want to talk about what happened in the parking garage? I mean, it’s not every day that someone else’s magic gives me the equivalent of a heart attack.”
“That implies I have magic, Teimhean. And I know that you and I will never quite agree on this, but I have no magic, no powers by which I can manipulate the world around me. Perhaps I am immortal, incapable of slipping permanently into death, but that is where anything unusual ends.”
“Hang on… ‘Incapable of slipping permanently into death?’ What the hell does that mean?” I looked at him, curious, and was unsettled by the unguarded pain in his face. “Do you mean to tell me that you die… and then you resurrect? You come back from the dead?”
He stopped eating then, giving me a shadowed look, the emotion in his eyes suddenly darkening the pale blue to a strange stormy grey. “As I die, so I wake. In sleep or in battle, I remain in that moment until death loses hold on me.” At my expression, his lips thinned into a grimly dark smile. “For example, if I were to die in a fire, I would feel that burning until I awoke. For eight hours, I would know nothing other than that pain. And if you must know, yes, it has been extensively… tested.”
He turned his gaze away from me, looking towards his water and I was grateful that he had looked away, for the knowledge of what I’d cursed him to sat sour in my stomach and I couldn’t look at him without feeling my stomach lurch dangerously. I picked up my own water, drinking and swallowing hard to try to control my traitorous body, and staring hard into my food to fight back the sting of my tears.
Christ almighty, how the hell was he sane?
"Well, that certainly managed to kill the evening. Perhaps we might attempt to resurrect it with effort.” I couldn’t help it; my gaze rose to his in reflex, in part an attempt to see if he truly had made the deplorable joke that I thought he had. By the fragmented smile on his lips, he had.
I winced, although I’ll confess that some of it was theatrics. “And I thought I was irreverent. That was just as tasteless as this pasta.” I pushed the plate of food away, picking up my glass. “But seriously, Xelander… I’m sorry.” My voice tried to crack, and I cleared my throat, wishing that I’d opted for something a good bit stronger than water with the meal. “If I had stopped for just a moment, if I had thought instead of reacted, things wouldn’t be like this.” We’d probably have both died on that battlefield, and who wouldn’t say it might not have been better?
“What do you mean, Teimhean? What aren’t you telling me?”
I took a deep breath, another sip of water, and then I took a second deep breath. This wasn’t easy. “I have been under contract to Valen Ravenswing since Eighteen Sixty-Four.” I let the silence fall for a moment, watching him think and remember. When the light hit his eyes, I spoke again. “Yes, I’ve been his… agent since the days of the war.”
He frowned, shaking his head. “I don’t understand. You were a Chaplain in the war… that man doesn’t strike me as any form of clergy.” He took a drink of his water, and I could see that he was still turning things over in his head. “You worked tirelessly to help the men, and when I saved your sorry backside-”
“You died, Xelander.” I interrupted, the hard truth finally starting to come out. “I think… I mean, I don’t think you died; I know that part. But I think I was hit by something; there was pain, and the next thing I knew, you’d landed on me. I’d thought you were trying to save my life, but you had taken three bullets, and your leg was ripped to hell by shrapnel from the cannon fire.” The look on his face was one of bafflement. He didn’t remember any of it. “I healed myself and then dragged you into the trees nearby so that I could heal you.”
“My magic had to shift from healing myself to healing you, and it’s a hell of a lot harder to heal someone else. I got the bullets out, but I couldn’t heal all the shrapnel damage. I wasn’t strong enough. You were bleeding out even as I was trying to save your life.” I could close my eyes and be there again, could relive it all at the merest thought. I kept it that way so as to never forget what I had done, and in part, it fueled the terrors that so often plagued my sleep.
Xelander stared hard at me, frowning as he tried to remember. “I bear no scars; surely I would have some mark that would bear testimony to this? Teimhean, I’m not saying that I don’t believe you, but perhaps it was a dream? A hallucination, brought on by the trauma of battle? It has a name now, an official diagnosis.” He was stubbornly refusing to give in to the words I was saying.
I shook my head. “You have no scars, no memory of this because I borrowed powers greater than my own to restore you. Valen Ravenswing stepped out of the fog of war and offered me the power to bring you back from the brink of death, and even still I almost lost you. I felt you slip away from me even as I drew on that borrowed power. But I fought, and you lived.”
When he said nothing, I continued. “There was, of course, a price. I was to do as Ravenswing wished. I was young, stupid, distracted by a thousand things, and I sure as hell didn’t think it through. I was given a chance, and I took it unwisely. I brought you back from the dead, and in the process, I sold my soul and powers to a man who turned out to be a Demon Lord.” I sighed, taking a sip of my water, and didn’t even wait to give him a chance to speak.
“Whatever he says, I must do” He winced at that, and I knew that the next would destroy everything that I had tried to rebuild. “You said you want to know the man I’ve become, well, I’ll tell you what I am. I’m a puppet, Xelander. Babysitter, CPA, toy, I’m whatever Valen Ravenswing tells me to be. And if he tells me that there is someone who must be killed, I am the one who has to do it. That’s why I’ve lost my healing… I’ve used my hands and magic to kill, forsworn my oaths, and tainted my soul. ”
Silence fell, a cloying blanket of nothingness that was almost as if I had lost my hearing once more. I watched Xelander with a heavy heart, noting how he searched my face for the truth, how he looked hard at my eyes. I didn’t look away; I’d told the truth, and I supposed that if I was to be damned, I might as well be damned as roundly as possible. I’d meant what I said, every condemning word, and there was little else I could do.
At length, I put my glass down, pinching the bridge of my nose. “What happened in the parking garage yesterday was what should have happened years ago. You’re a doctor, a man who fights for life. You’re the quintessential Paladin of days gone by; a man who goes charging in to an unknown and does what it takes to protect the lives around him. You and I are two completely opposing forces, and if I hadn’t been immortal, I’d probably have dropped dead on the spot.” Still, there was no reaction, and I started to wonder if this was real or some bizarre dream. “God, Xelander, say something, anything. Give me some sign that you hear what I’m saying and that it means something to you.”
He lowered his fork and regarded me quietly for a long moment before he rose to his feet. “Thank you for the meal.” He pushed his chair in and was in the front room before I could get to my feet and follow. By the time I caught up with him, he was letting himself out of the front door and I fell against the door after he closed it, my scar burning all the way down to my heart. It was just another level of pain I’d probably have to get used to, but perhaps it would go away like Xelander had. I’d be so lucky.