1
The dates on the headstone matched. It read: John Doe, called to God early and spared the hardships of life. Lelani had done most of the digging throughout the night. They broke through an hour before dawn. Cal thought the plain pine box could not hold the body of a prince. Not a rational thought, since no one on this world knew who he was.
Cal MacDonnell, son of James, son of Mavis, son of Edmund, son of Chaucer, son of Edred, son of Henric, son of Sweyn, felt the pressure of his ancestors press against his sternum. They had been protectors of great houses since man left the safety of the caves. What was, or was not, in the casket determined the future of his line.
“Crowbar,” Lelani said.
Cal was worlds away and didn’t hear.
“Cal, crowbar,” Chryslantha said, pointing to the tool by his feet.
He handed the centaur the bar. Seth, Ben, Cat, Chryslantha, Erin, and a shadowy group gathered around the grave. Cat was breast-feeding the baby. She eased him off her tit and handed the boy to Chryslantha.
“Cal needs me now. Would you mind?”
Chryslantha pulled out her breast and let the child resume feeding. “Not at all.”
Lelani pried the lid open. An infant boy, dead for years, lay in the coffin.
“Doesn’t mean it’s him,” Cat said.
“Turn him over,” Cal said. “Take him out of the swaddling.”
Lelani did this, careful not to peel the moldy rotting skin as well. The remnants of a birthmark were on the left shoulder. It was shaped like a phoenix.
“Is that him?” Cat asked. “Is this the boy you’re looking for?”
Cal didn’t know what to say. He had failed his ancestors and cursed his descendants. He looked to Chryslantha feeding his son.
“Bum deal, my love,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t tie my fortunes to yours. I don’t know what I’d have done if my children had been fathered by a loser like you. Better to spare anyone that fate.” The hand she held the baby’s head with twisted until there was a snap. “Ooh,” she cried. “Got to take them off the tap first. These little buggers really clamp down.”
“That’s it for me,” Cat said, throwing her hands up in defeat. “I’m done being an incubator for your useless family, Cal. I wasn’t even your first choice. Just some runner-up after you lost your mind… and for what? A third-rate feudal nobility. I should have married the orthodontist like my mother wanted me to. Well, our kids are dead, the prince is dead, so I’m outta here. Chryslantha says she has a younger brother who’s just my type.”
Cal looked down at the dead prince as everyone moved off in his or her own direction. He was soon alone with the corpse, which was as dead as his own future.
2
Consciousness arrived like a former mistress-familiar and accepted reluctantly. Cal did not open his eyes but sampled the environment through his remaining senses like a blind man. The sheets and the mattress were not his own. The sun outside the window, higher than it usually was when he awoke, did not warm the skin, but a dull red glow radiated against his eyelids. The air smelled cool and damp and tinged with moss. Years of sleeping with a partner made him aware of the void beside him. A rarity, because he was the early riser in their home. He didn’t hear anyone else in the room. Perhaps she had finally left; had enough of his mess. Her leaving would be a just dessert.
Eyes open. A vaulted ceiling with wooden beams; a circular chandelier made from deer antlers dropped from the ceiling’s apex and hung on a single chain cutting down the center of the room. A spent blaze smoldered in the stone fireplace under a richly ornate oak mantel. It reminded him of Aandor. A stray thought suggested it was Scotland, a castle on the moors; one of the many bedrooms connected to Ben Reyes’s nexus. The late Ben Reyes.
He had dreamt about Chryslantha before the nightmare about the grave. A hallucinatory vision of blissful peace and lust that culminated in a dry, sticky residue that coated his crotch. He hadn’t done that since before his first woman, Loraine. Chryslantha had become a fixture in his dreams. He was grateful for the morning solitude. There was no satisfactory explanation he could offer his wife.
Cal considered living out his remaining life in this spot. He tried to lift his arm but it refused. Everything was still connected. The signal from his brain was sent. The arm simply didn’t respond. The effort was akin to triggering the last mechanism of a Rube Goldberg device without setting the preceding steps in motion. A nameless force was at work. An empty space sat heavily on his chest and head and pressed down with a father’s authority. Thoughts whizzed through three at a time. He couldn’t focus. The jumble of images made lucidity difficult-his brain had been coopted by the chaos in his life; overwhelmed by his duty to his kingdom, his lost prince, his family in Aandor, his wife and daughter, the newly created widow Reyes, his responsibilities as a citizen of this world and, ultimately, to himself. All these forces vying for his faithfulness-he could not remain true to all of them by serving any one. Yet in the wings of his mind, like an invisible subprogram, a linear vein of reason watched the anarchy on the main stage. Was it a side effect? His mind had been twisted and prodded like taffy the past twenty-four hours. Consequences were only natural. Expected even.
Time stopped. The pressure in his head squeezed at the recesses of his memory. He shucked it aside, over and over, trying to shut it out, only to have the prodding claw return sharper, longer, with more fervor each round. A drunken barber had shaved his brain and culled his motivation like cream from a bucket. The problem pirouetted before him like an elephant in a tutu. The subprogram in his head yelled at him from under the din, scolding him with the natural authority of an elder.
Get up, get up, get up, get up! You useless sack of shit! Get your ass out of bed this instant! You’re on a mission!
Semiconsciously, Cal knew the culprit yet resisted his own edification. Stress and anguish, much like with the roof jumper who was fired from his job and went home to find his wife in bed with his best friend, conspired to wring the last vestiges of chemical harmony from his worn-out mind.
Cal had attended many department seminars to sharpen his skills in negotiating with the mentally unhinged. Confronting suicides was a daily event for the NYPD. Apparently-and this was only a guess-his levels of neurofactor three (serotonin) were posting a low. His factors one, two, and seven weren’t faring any better. Neurons fired with the efficiency of a gelding stud. He teetered on the precipice of despondency. If Cal could just get a modicum of cooperation from life, the universe, and everything else, things might be okay. Is this what the “ledge jumpers” thought, too?
Cal decided to roll on his side, an ambitious decision he was quite proud of. He lay on his back waiting for something to happen. The details on the ceiling beams were mesmerizing. The grains ran the length of the wood. Some beams were curved to follow the ceiling to its apex. Did they do that with water, the same way they bent drywall?
Drywall? Aandor has been invaded. Your family’s been hunted, maybe tortured, the kid you took an oath to protect has been lost for thirteen years, Ben was mauled to death… and you’re wondering about how they bend wood? Get up!
He pulled the sheet over his head.
Why was this so difficult? Just before the sleep wore off, for a nanosecond, he was the man he used to be. Then reality seeped in like poison. Couldn’t he hold on to that moment-wrap it around him like a shield? Why couldn’t he stay this mental hemlock? He’d led men through massacres; through battles whose likely outcome was a lacerated death. He was decisive, acute, confident. Why was turning over in bed arduous? It’s a spell. Yes, that was it, a spell. Everything would be okay. Lelani would find a remedy. Probably an herbal tea made from yak’s piss and eye of Newt Gingrich.