And in her heart, she had always known it.
She wanted to say, “Why are you here? What do you want?” but her mouth was too dry — and it didn’t seem she had to. He answered as if she had.
“I’ve always been here, and what I want — what I have always wanted — is your welfare.”
Her welfare? Beth’s memories of Arius had always been muddled — it was as if they existed behind some veil, some superimposed scrim through which she could only catch glimpses of strange and confusing events — but protecting and caring for her was certainly not the way those memories came back to her now. Not at all. The memories — sensory impressions, really — were, all of them, dark and deeply troubling. Just seeing him here made her skin crawl.
Without his having visibly moved, he seemed again to have moved perceptibly closer. The smell of rain-washed leaves was stronger. And even though the light in the room was dim and ambient at best, he seemed somehow to have gathered it all to him. He stood out against the black shadows, in his black suit, his face subtly glowing, as if from a fire within. The amber lenses concealed the color of his eyes, but Beth had a recollection — a vague and terrible recollection — of eyes that churned and changed and penetrated, like knives, whatever they looked at.
“And to prove what I’m saying, I am here now only to give you a warning.”
“Of what?”
“Go home, now, to Joey.”
Beth felt jolted as if by an electric shock. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with Joey?” In the flood of her concern, even her fear was subsumed.
“There’s still time. But go. You need to be with him now.”
With no reason to believe him, Beth did; with no reason to do what he was suggesting, she had an overwhelming impulse to race out of the gallery. But nothing would make her turn her back on Arius; it was as if she weren’t even capable of it. There was something riveting about his very presence, something hypnotic even in his partially concealed eyes.
He stepped back, and the shadows fell more fully over his face.
Was he deliberately doing that?
“I will,” Beth said, her voice soft and faltering, “but tell me: why? What’s going to happen?”
Again without moving, he seemed to have receded farther into the room. The white light meant to illuminate the final pages of the Apocalypse barely touched his perfect features and the waves of his white-gold hair.
But his head tilted to one side, as if he’d heard something, just a split second before Beth heard the whoosh of the gallery door opening, three rooms away, and a footfall approaching. “Hello? Ms. Cox? Are you in here?”
It was the security guard, the one she’d waved to at the tram plaza.
She didn’t answer at first — and she wondered why. Was it because she was actually seeking to protect Arius from discovery?
“Ms. Cox?” The voice was coming closer, and even though the lights in the exhibition hall were on, a flashlight beam was sweeping the darkened corners.
“I’m in here,” she finally said, turning her head.
The guard — she only remembered that his name started with a G—rounded the partition and said, “Everything okay? We registered an intrusion in the security office.”
Beth looked back toward Arius, but he was gone.
“I entered my code,” she assured him.
“I know — we had that. But security was tripped again, after that.” He played his flashlight around the dimly lighted room and poked his head behind a couple of the standing display cases. “Must have been a glitch, I guess.”
Now she could see the name on his laminated badge — Gary Graydon.
But where had Arius gone? There was only one way out of the gallery, and how could he have slipped past the guard unnoticed?
“What’s all that on the floor?” Graydon said, and Beth glanced down at the papers she had utterly forgotten were lying around her feet. She bent down and picked up the folder with the other pages of the secret letter in it. She slipped the page she was still holding — she’d forgotten she was holding that, too — inside, and after casting one last look around the gallery, said, “I’m done here.”
“Good,” Graydon replied. “We’ve got enough on our hands already today.”
“What do you mean?” Beth said, leaving the gallery with the guard close behind.
“The wildfires.”
Beth stopped, “Where?”
“Where aren’t they?” Graydon said. “They’re springing up all over town, from Bel-Air to the Palisades. Even with all the warnings about fireworks and the drought conditions, it looks like some people never listen.”
Beth didn’t need to hear any more. Clutching the folder tightly under her arm, she hurried out of the gallery, and then, with Arius’s warning to go home ringing in her ears, sprinted across the empty plaza toward the tram.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Carter was so absorbed in the work that at first he didn’t even feel the cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He’d turned off the ring the second he came into the museum; he didn’t want anyone — especially Gunderson — finding out he was there, on a national holiday yet, concealed in a storage closet, in the sub-basement, working on the most volatile discovery the La Brea Tar Pits had ever yielded. He’d never be able to finish explaining.
“Look at this fracture line,” Del was saying, indicating with a scalpel a crack in the skull near the temporal lobe. “Tell me that’s not from a blow.”
The phone vibrated again, and this time Carter noticed. “Hang on,” he said.
The connection, as usual down here, was terrible. But it was Beth, and she sounded agitated. She was saying something about… Arius.
“Slow down,” Carter said, instinctively turning away from the table and stepping out in the corridor. “You’re breaking up.”
“Arius,” she said again, “was here, at the Getty.”
Was it just another scare — several times they had thought there was evidence that Arius had survived, and was stalking them — or was it for real this time? Despite all their suspicions and fears, neither of them had ever seen or encountered him for sure.
She was saying something else, but it was coming through in bursts of static.
“I can’t hear you,” Carter said, wondering if she could hear him, either. “Are you okay? Is Joey okay?” That was the crucial thing.
“Yes.”
He heard that. Then something that he couldn’t make out. Then: “… on the tram. I’m going home right now, to Joey. The fires are spreading.”
“What fires?”
“… from fireworks maybe…”
Fourth of July fireworks had already started a wildfire? It was only late afternoon — he’d thought the danger would have come after nightfall.
“Not in Summit View…,” she was saying, “but above Sunset, the Palisades… Bel-Air.”
At the mention of Bel-Air, his ears pricked up. There were fires, approaching Bel-Air? The al-Kalli estate? The bestiary?
“I’ll call you at home,” he said, but already he sensed that the line had gone dead. “Beth — can you hear me?” He could tell that the line was still open, but he had no idea if he was transmitting. “I’m leaving now. I’ll see you at home as soon as I can get there. Beth?”
But the line was definitely dead.
He stuck the phone back in his pocket, went back into the converted storage closet, and said, “I’ve got to go — right now.”
Del looked stunned, and a little bit pissed; Carter knew that Del had been irritated lately by Carter’s elusiveness and seeming lack of commitment to the project at hand. More than once Carter had wished he could simply explain it all to him — not only because he hated to be so evasive with one of his oldest friends, but because he would have welcomed Del’s insights and opinions. Sitting up in Bel-Air, of all places on earth, was, without a doubt, the most astounding discovery in the history of the animal kingdom, a revelation second only to Darwin’s, a glimpse into the earliest origins of reptilian, mammalian, and avian life, and no one would have understood all that more deeply than Del.