Deirdre followed after the nurse, leaving Beltan asleep on the chairs. They moved through a pair of double doors and down a corridor. The nurse gestured to a stainless-steel door. Deirdre gathered her will, then stepped inside.
The soft whir of machines filled the air, along with the sharp scent of antiseptic. She took a step into the room, and a shock jolted through her. She was used to Anders’s large, room-filling presence. The man crumpled on the hospital bed looked strangely small.
“Hey there, mate,” croaked a weary voice.
More emotions than she could name filled Deirdre: joy, relief, anguish, sorrow, and a dozen others. They had propped him up in the bed. A sheet covered him from the waist down, and his upper body was bare save for a large bandage wrapped around his barrel chest. IV needles had been inserted in each of his arms. He looked older than she remembered; the fluorescent light made his hair gray rather than blond. However, he managed a faint smile, and a hint of the usual twinkle glinted in his blue eyes.
“Never thought I’d see you again, partner,” he said, the words hoarse. “Never thought I’d see anything again, for that matter.”
Deirdre tried to speak but couldn’t. She gripped his hand. His fingers tightened around hers, stronger than she would have guessed.
“Now, now, Deirdre. There’s no need to cry. Turns out I’m going to be just fine. Though it’s got the doctors baffled, to say the least. I gather the bullet put a nick in some important artery. They keep saying I should have bled to death in the time it took the ambulance to get there. Only I didn’t.”
Deirdre couldn’t help smiling. “You’re full of surprises. Mate.”
He grinned, and though a bit shaky, the expression was as impish as ever. “Sorry about that.” His grin faded. “I know you’ll probably never believe me, but I didn’t like lying to you. I always wanted to tell you the truth, but Nakamura wouldn’t let me.”
Her own smile faded. “I believe you.”
A grimace crossed his face. Pain from his wound? “Aw, mate,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She laid her right hand on his brow while her left kept a grip on his hand. In three years, she had hardly touched him. It felt good now to be connected. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I knew deep down I could trust you, and I let Sasha convince me I couldn’t.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Turns out Sasha had a lot of help in the matter. I never did quite trust her, though I couldn’t ever put my finger on just why. She always seemed to know a little too much, maybe. But Eustace—I thought the kid was true-blue.”
“They fooled us both,” Deirdre said.
“Yeah, they did at that. But you stopped them.”
She shook her head. “No, Beltan did. And you did. But Marius . . .”
“He’s gone, isn’t he?”
Deirdre could only nod.
Anders’s blue eyes were thoughtful. “I have to say, I would have liked to have gotten to meet him. Crikey, a real Philosopher.”
“They’re not what you think,” Deirdre said, her voice going hard.
“I know. Not everything you do, I’m sure. But I think Nakamura had started to suspect something fishy was going on with the Philosophers, that not all of them were getting along so well. He’s been a Seeker long enough to notice when things started to change, and I think he was beginning to get conflicting orders from them. He assigned me to guard you because he had a feeling you were involved, though he didn’t know how exactly.” Again Anders grinned. “Turns out he was right. But it was important for him to make everyone believe I was just your new partner, yourself included. He didn’t want the Philosophers to know he had assigned you a bodyguard, for fear he might get their ire up.”
So Deirdre wasn’t the only one with good instincts. Nakamura had gotten the sense that there was some conflict among the Philosophers, and the orders Marius kept giving him had made Nakamura believe Deirdre was involved. All the while he had possessed the good sense to appear neutral and unaware of the truth, even while assigning a guard to Deirdre without the Philosophers knowing it.
Deirdre wondered what else Nakamura knew, but before she could ask Anders the nurse tapped on the window, giving Deirdre a stern look. She started to pull away.
Anders gripped her, holding her down.
“You’re going after them, aren’t you? The Philosophers.”
She nodded. “The seven sarcophagi are being delivered to London tomorrow. They’re going to open the gate.”
“Take me with you.” His eyes gleamed with fevered light. “I want to help with the battle.”
She bent over him. “You havehelped with the battle. Without you, there wouldn’t be a chance at all. Now it’s time to rest.”
Deirdre’s face drew close to his, and a warmth encapsulated her: nourishing, healing. Her lips nearly brushed against his, then she moved and pressed them to his forehead in a gentle kiss.
“Come back to me, mate.” Tears rolled from the corner of his eyes. “Promise me you will.”
Deirdre let go of his hand. “Good-bye, Anders.”
She walked past the whispering machines and left the room. For a moment she stood outside the door, gripping her bear claw necklace. The warmth that had enfolded her had been replaced by a cruel chill. Then she took a deep breath and headed down the corridor, back to the waiting area. Beltan was sitting on one of the orange chairs. He stood as she drew near, a questioning look on his face.
“Let’s go to London,” she said.
44.
Six hours later, Deirdre and Beltan caught the first train of the morning out of Edinburgh.
Traveling by plane would have gotten them to London an hour or two faster; logic dictated that they should have headed to the airport. Instead, after they left their hotel, she and Beltan had walked up Princes Street in the gray predawn light to the train station beneath the National Gallery. Maybe it was her instincts again, or maybe it was simply a desire to stay grounded, connected with the Earth, but somehow going by rail seemed right.
She could only hope that was true, that they would reach London before the shipment from Crete arrived.
“I think we should have gotten more coffee,” Beltan said as they settled into their seats on the train. He crumpled the paper cup they had bought at a shop in the station.
Deirdre gripped her own cup. It was still full and too hot to drink. “There’ll be a cart. You can buy more.”
The blond man looked around expectantly, and Deirdre didn’t bother to tell him the cart wouldn’t come along until after the train was under way; watching for it would keep him occupied.
Beltan looked freshly awake that morning, his green eyes bright and eager. He had removed the bandage from his cheek; the wound was no more than a thin scab now, as if he had gotten it a week ago.
It’s the fairy blood in him. It’s what causes him to recover so quickly.
Deirdre wished she had a little fairy blood herself. She had not slept last night. Not that she hadn’t craved to; she was more weary than she could ever remember being in her life. But such peace as sleep brought was for other people, other times. She had sat at the desk in her hotel room, reading through Marius’s journal—which she had taken from the manor—a second time, and a third.
Just as surely as the fairy blood had changed Beltan, the journal—and the knowledge contained in its pages—had changed Deirdre. After reading it, she would never—could never—be the same person again. But who would she be, she had wondered, sitting alone in the hotel room? Instead of countless possibilities fluttering through her mind, she saw nothing. Nothing at all. The answer to that question would have to wait until what lay ahead of her was done, for good or for ill.
She had spent the last hour in her room softly singing the song Fire and Wonderover and over. As before, she felt close to understanding what it meant, and she found herself wishing she had her lute, for her mind always seemed to work better when the instrument was in her hands. However, at that moment her lute was in her flat in London, and as close as she was to reaching understanding, it might as well have been a thousand miles away; she didn’t know what the song meant.