She set down her napkin, picked up the painting, and stood. "Thank you for the beautiful painting. I hope you heed my warnings, Alex. Since you don"t seem to need my help, I"ll attend to other concerns."
She stopped and turned back. "By the way, covens have to do with witches-thirteen of them-not sorcerers. I"d not like to even contemplate thirteen witch women all together in one place at once. They"re known for their rather rash temperament. Be glad they can"t get here; they"d simply gut you and be done with it."
She marched away without a further word.
Alex knew that he"d blown it. He"d crossed a line he hadn"t known was there. Or maybe he crossed a line that he should have known was there. She had wanted him to listen, to try to understand, to trust her. But how could he be expected to believe such a preposterous story?
The waitress had seen Jax leaving and headed for the table. Alex pulled out a hundred-dollar bill-the only kind of cash he had-threw it on the table, and told the waitress to keep the change. It was the biggest tip he"d ever left in his life. He rushed across the quiet room, weaving among the tables.
"Jax, wait. Please?"
Without slowing she glided through the door and out into the halls, her black dress flowing out behind like dark fire.
"Jax, I"m sorry. Look, I don"t know anything about it. I admit it. I"m sorry. I shouldn"t be so flippant-it"s one of my faults-but how would you react if the situation were reversed, if before today I told you how we make tea?"
She ignored his words.
"Jax, please, don"t go."
He broke into a trot trying to catch up with her. Without looking back she turned down a small, dimly lit hall toward a side exit. Long skeins of wavy blond hair trailed out behind her like flags of fury. An exit sign cast the hall in hazy red, otherworldly light.
Jax reached the door before he could catch up with her. She stopped abruptly and turned to him in a way that made him stop dead in his tracks. He was almost close enough to reach out and touch her. Something warned him to stay where he was.
"Do you know the meaning of the name Alexander?"
Alex wanted to say something to her, to apologize, to talk her into staying, but he knew without a doubt that he had better answer her question and no more or he would cross a line . . . forever.
"It means "defender of man, warrior." "
She smiled to herself just a little. "That"s right. And do you value your name, its meaning?"
"Why do you think I sign my work, my pa.s.sion, "Alexander"?"
She gazed at him a long moment, her features softening just a bit. "Maybe there is hope for you. Maybe there is yet hope for all of us."
She abruptly turned and threw open the door. Without looking back she said over her shoulder, "Heed my words, Alexander, defender of man: Trouble will find you."
Harsh afternoon light flared into the hall, turning her figure into nothing more than a harsh fragment of silhouette twisting the shafts of light.
Alex reached the door just as it slammed shut. He threw it open again and ran out into an empty side parking lot. Trees grew in a green band close to the building. Beyond gra.s.sy hillocks waited parked cars that in the flat gray light of the overcast afternoon no longer looked nearly so l.u.s.trous.
Jax was nowhere to be seen.
Alex stood staring around at the quiet, empty surroundings.
She"d been out of his sight for only a few seconds. She couldn"t have been more than a half-dozen steps ahead of him. It seemed crazy, but she had vanished. The woman had just vanished into thin air.
Just like she had vanished the last time.
He wondered if this was how it had been for his mother.
ALEX REALIZED THAT it was dark and that he had been driving around in a daze for hours. He found it unnerving that he hadn"t even noticed that it had gotten dark.
Jax"s final words, her warning, kept echoing in his thoughts. He didn"t know if she had meant them literally, or in the way his grandfather always meant them. He was beginning to wonder if his grandfather had always meant more than Alex had thought. While Ben had the seven wrong-according to Jax-he had been on to something, or close to it, anyway.
But that was only if the things she had been saying were true. If not, then it made Ben just the eccentric old man most people believed him to be. But Alex knew him to be a strong and wise man, a man in many ways shaped, perhaps haunted, by his years in special forces, doing only G.o.d knew what back before Alex had been born.
Alex had learned only obliquely, from his parents" conversations, the shadowy shape of Ben"s history. Alex had on occasion seen medals usually kept out of sight. Twice he had heard phone calls from men Ben only addressed as "sir." Ben would smile in that distant way he had and thank the caller for letting him know. Ben never talked about the things he had done, dismissing them as his past, as his time away.
But he did pa.s.s on lessons from those times. Ben thought it was important for Alex to know certain things that few others could teach him. Those lessons spoke volumes about the teacher.
Alex again wondered about Jax"s warning, and about Ben"s.
Alex didn"t know what to do. He didn"t know how to handle such a strange situation. It just didn"t fit any template he knew of. No one, not even Ben, had ever told him how to handle a person who said they were from a different world.
He felt foolish taking such a story seriously, but at the same time he wanted to believe her. She had needed him to believe her. He felt trapped in a situation where if he believed her he might end up being a fool, a dupe, but if he didn"t believe her, and what she was telling him actually was true, then he might end up being responsible for some undefined but terrible consequences.
But how could such a story be true? How could he even consider believing such a story about visitors from other worlds? It simply wasn"t possible.
Yet his mother had warned him of some of the very same things Jax had tried to warn him about. He couldn"t make that add up. How could he not take such a thing seriously?
Jax was the key to finding the truth. More than that, even, it felt to him like she was somehow the key to his life.
He felt drawn to her in a way he"d never been drawn to anyone else. She was a mesmerizing woman. For Alex, her insight and intelligence amplified her beauty. Despite all of her mystery and the strange things she had to say, he felt comfortable with her, more comfortable than he had ever felt with anyone. She had the same inner spark-some way of looking at the world-that he had. He could see it in her eyes. He almost felt as if he could look into her eyes and see her soul laid bare to him.
Gloom crushed him for having driven her away.
In his mind, he again ran through a speech he would like to make. He would like to ask her to imagine how she would feel if he were to abruptly show up in her world and tell her that he talked into a metal device and people anywhere in the world could hear him. How would she have taken the news if he told her that people in his world flew in metal tubes tens of thousands of feet in the air? He couldn"t stop his racing mind from coming up with examples of technology that she would surely find impossible to believe. If he had come to her in the way she had come to him, would she have believed him?
It troubled him somewhat that even thinking of what he might say to her might be taking her story too seriously and falling into some kind of con game.
He wanted to tell her so much, to find out so much. Some of the things she"d said were just flat too eerily correct to discount, but at the same time her story was beyond hard to swallow. Other worlds. Who was she trying to fool? There were no other worlds.
Did she expect him to believe that some sorcerers had boiled up a magic brew and somehow beamed her to the Regent Center? And that yet others had placed a call to his phone from a different universe, or planet, or dimension, or something?
He wondered why, if her story was so hard to swallow, he had smashed his cell phone.
He realized that he needed to talk to her more than any other person in the world. Or in both worlds, if it really was true.
But if it wasn"t true, then what had he seen? What about the things she knew, the things she could tell him that she shouldn"t be able to know. How in the world could she know that he didn"t remember his dreams? That was just plain creepy. Was she simply taking a wild stab in the dark? Guessing? After all, a lot of people probably didn"t remember their dreams.
Or did she really know?
Yet again he worried that the whole thing could be some kind of elaborate trick. There were stage magicians, after all, who could make a woman, an elephant, or even a plane disappear. Even though they made it look completely convincing he knew that such things weren"t real, knew it was all a trick.
Alex didn"t like being tricked by magicians. It always struck him as a form of dishonesty about the nature of reality. Maybe that was why he didn"t like magic tricks-and magic, real magic, simply didn"t exist. He"d always felt that reality was better than magical; it was wondrous. That was part of the reason he never tired of painting the beauty of the world.
But why would Jax try to trick him? What reason would she have for doing such a thing? What was there for her to gain?
The fifty thousand acres came to mind.
He couldn"t stop wondering if it could be some kind of trick to con him out of the inheritance. That much land was worth a fortune.
She claimed to have watched through a mirror as someone had gone into the gallery and defaced his paintings, but wouldn"t it make more sense that it had been done by someone working with her? It seemed like a lot of money for a con, but if she was really after the land, the cost of the paintings would be a pittance in comparison to what they stood to gain if they could somehow trick him out of a fortune likely to be worth millions.
Such a motive easily made more sense than that she had come from some distant world, that she was a different kind of human, a sorceress with magical abilities. Who was she kidding? A sorceress. What kind of fool did she take him for? Did she really expect him to believe her?
But he did.
Against everything, he did. He couldn"t explain why, but he believed her. There was something about her that struck him as not only sincere but desperate.
Either she had to be the best con artist ever born, or she really was a different kind of human from a different world. He couldn"t imagine how it could be anything other than a trick or the truth. It came down to one of those two choices, and that was what was driving him crazy.
If she really was telling him the truth, then maybe his father, who had died in a car accident, had really been murdered and his mother"s brain damage wasn"t anything natural, like a stroke, as the doctors had thought. If Jax really was telling the truth, that meant that there really was something going on, something deadly serious.
But instead of telling her that he believed her, or at least listening respectfully, he"d chased her away. He desperately wished he hadn"t done that, but he hadn"t been able to help himself.
Maybe he"d just been afraid of being a sucker, of being the dupe of a beautiful woman. Wasn"t that how con artists worked? Use a beautiful woman to lull a guy into believing anything, doing anything?
But he did believe her.
Right then, more than anything, lacking Jax, Alex decided that he needed to talk to Ben. His grandfather, strange as he could sometimes be, seemed like the right person to help unravel what had become a tight knot of doubts.
Alex smiled at the thought of explaining that it wasn"t the seven in twenty-seven, but the nine, a number powered by threes, that was really what was important. His grandfather would be astounded. His grandfather would take such talk seriously. His grandfather might even be able to put it all into some kind of context that made sense.
As Alex turned onto Atlantic Street, headed home, he saw a red glow in the sky. Within a few blocks it became clear that it was a fire. A house in the distance was burning. A red glow lit billowing black smoke.
He soon realized that the blaze was in the direction of his house. Alex gripped the steering wheel tighter and tighter the closer he got to home. Could someone from this other world already be trying to cause him trouble, maybe even kill him? He sped up, suddenly eager to get home, hoping that it wasn"t his house that was burning-there were valuable paintings there. Valuable to him, anyway.
When he spotted flashing lights in the rearview mirror he pulled over. An ambulance raced past. He suddenly felt guilty worrying about mere paintings and hoped no one was hurt in a fire. He couldn"t imagine the horror of being burned.
His heart in his throat, Alex pulled around the corner, accelerating up the street, past houses with lights all on and people standing out in their yards looking toward the blaze.
With a jolt, he realized that it was his grandfather"s house that was burning.
Alex slammed on the brakes as he pulled to the side of the street and parked crookedly at the curb. Cars with onlookers had parked to watch.
Fire trucks crowded the street, all parked at c.o.c.keyed angles. Amber lights on the fire trucks strobed the night. A police car, blue lights flashing, was parked crossways, blocking traffic.
Alex set the brake and leaped out. He ran with all his strength toward his grandfather"s house. His vision narrowed down until all he saw was the familiar home engulfed in a terrifying glow of yellow and orange flames. He didn"t even see all the firefighters in heavy yellow coats and helmets striped with reflective tape. Panic powered his legs as he ran.
An arm suddenly hooked him around the middle, spinning him around, stopping him cold. He pushed at the arms that came around and encircled him.
"Let me go! It"s my grandfather"s house! Let me go!"
"Hold on there," a big cop said. "You can"t get any closer."
"I have to! We have to get him out!"
Two firemen stepped in around him.
"He"s already out, son," the older man said.
Alex stared at him. "He is?" He looked around as the cop finally released him. "Where is he?"
The senior fireman put an arm around Alex"s shoulders and walked him toward one of the two ambulances. All the flashing lights up and down the street made the scene seem surreal, otherworldly. One red-and-white ambulance was parked, all its doors closed. The back doors of the other were spread wide. Paramedics stood around, not looking at all in a hurry.
Even at a distance the heat was so intense that it hurt the side of Alex"s face. Acrid smoke burned his throat. Hoses snaked all over the street. Streamers of water arced off into the furnace of flame. It was easy to see that there was shortly going to be nothing left of his grandfather"s house.
As they got closer, Alex saw a gurney with the slight form of what might have been a body entirely covered in a gray blanket. Two paramedics stood over it on the far side.
"I"m sorry," the man holding Alex"s shoulders said as they approached. "He was long gone when we got in there."
Alex stood staring at the gurney. He ran the words through his mind again, and then again. They didn"t seem real.
"He"s dead? Ben is dead?"
"I"m afraid so. From the looks of it, the fire started downstairs in a workshop. That"s where we found the gentleman. One of my men looked in the bas.e.m.e.nt door and spotted him reflected in a mirror. He was on the floor not far to the side. There wasn"t much left of him by then but we were at least able to use the hoses to cool the doorway enough to manage to recover his remains. I"m sorry, son."
"I"m his only family," Alex said in a distant voice, somehow feeling that it all couldn"t be real. "The only family left. I always told him to be careful with torches and soldering irons down there."
"It very well may be that he pa.s.sed on from a heart attack or stroke and then something hot left unattended started the fire. I"ve seen it happen that way with older people."
"But he was burned?"
"I"m afraid so, but it"s very possible that it was after he was already gone. We don"t know yet."
"Ben," Alex said in a tearful voice as he knelt beside the remains covered in a gray blanket, "please don"t leave me like this. I need you so much right now."
It felt like the world was falling in on him.
Some of the rafters gave way and the entire roof came crashing down. Huge flames roared up into the air. Columns of sparks and billowing smoke lifted into the night sky.
Alex laid an arm over his grandfather and broke down in tears.
THE CORONER"S OFFICE HAD BENN unable to determine the actual cause of death. They said that the remains were too badly burned to make that determination, but that since he had been found on the floor down in his workshop, rather than in bed, it was improbable that Alex"s grandfather had been overcome by smoke in his sleep. The fire extinguisher, hanging nearby on the foundation wall, was charged and in working order, but it hadn"t been used. There was an exit door not far away.
Considering those factors and the lack of any evidence to the contrary, the coroner"s finding was that Benjamin Rahl had most likely lost consciousness or died of natural causes before the fire started, and the fire had been the result of something hot left unattended at his workbench while he was either unconscious or already deceased.
Alex had his grandfather"s remains cremated. Ben had always said that he didn"t want his corpse rotting in the ground, that he"d rather have the clean purification of fire consume his worldly self.
Still, considering what had happened, having Ben cremated seemed insensitive. Alex knew, though, that it was what his grandfather had wanted.
But more than that, Ben, who Ben was, was gone. The remains were not Ben, not to Alex, anyway. Those remains had been released by the fire to return to the elements of the universe.