Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1 (2 page)

“That was generous of
you,” a new voice spoke, “by your standards.”

The Sovereign grunted.
“I told Rome there was nothing to be done at the moment. Wasn't I
correct, Morgan?"

A woman suddenly
appeared in a puff of dark smoke. Like the Sovereign, she was
enshrouded in a deep black cloak, yet hers was soft like velvet and
swirled about her as she moved. In her left hand she clutched a
metallic red staff topped by a crystal ball.

She wrapped one gnarled
green hand on the crystal and spoke, "Sovereign, the child is lost
for now in the fabric of time and space." Her voice seemed to come
from everywhere and nowhere in the room, as if it were not tethered
to her actual form. “The presence was so weak, as if influenced by
fatigue or fear, barely detectable to me, then amplified, strong,
stronger than most I have sensed. As quickly as that, it was weak
again, then gone, gone…”

"Do you really believe
it likely that the lone child of a slaughtered race will become my
downfall?" the Sovereign asked Morgan while folding his
arms.

The woman replied
calmly and without hesitation, "I have read the signs, used the
runes, conversed with the gods and goddesses of time and
space–"

"Just answer the damned
question!" he snapped.

Morgan shrugged and
responded simply, "It is what I have seen."

Morgan was prepared for
an explosion of the Sovereign's temper. Instead he merely sighed
and placed his hand against his face hidden in the hood of his
cloak.

He stood like that for
a long time before finally asking, "Tell me, Morgan, do your
visions always come to pass?"

"The future is a very
unpredictable thing. One different step can make a new
path."

"Then you don't know,"
the Sovereign replied.

“All I know is what I
see. I see only probabilities,” she agreed. “The future is what we
make of it.”

The Sovereign sighed
and said, "You have made many accurate predictions in your service
to me. Show me how we may keep this from being one of
them."

Chapter
One

“You'd think they'd
tell us before we drove for twelve hours,” Ross Preston muttered,
obviously bitter.

“Did you say something,
honey?” Liza, his wife, asked distractedly. She had been gloomily
staring out the car window and to the horizon for the better part
of an hour.

Liza was normally quite
cheery, and tended to elicit the same cheerfulness from others. A
high school art teacher, she was a favorite among her students.
Petite, with mousy blond hair, and a voice that was barely audible,
Liza Preston was the perfect image of a ‘little woman.’

Her small stature and
gentle behavior contrasted quite starkly with her husband. He was
over six feet tall, brown eyed, and had brown curly hair which
simply never looked neat. He was almost obsessively focused on
whatever he did and shined as a promising young assistant district
attorney, but tended not to handle social situations well. Quite
simply, he was a loudmouthed and outspoken hard-ass of a
man.

Yet to anyone who
really knew them it was clear that Ross and Liza Preston
complemented each other perfectly, as if they were the Batman and
Robin of married couples. Ross was the father figure who could
inspire even the most hardened criminal to go straight. Liza was
the comforting mother figure who, just by using her soft voice and
a few choice words, could convince anyone that they could
change.

As opposite as Ross and
Liza were, what truly united them was a fiery ambition to help
anyone who needed it, no matter how far gone a person might
be.

They found joy in every
life they were able to influence. At that particular moment,
however, the only life they wanted to guide was that of their own
child, a child whom the specialists at Salem Fertility Center had
just told them they could never have.

"It’s truly unfair that
some doctors, no matter how questionable their choice of practice,
are able to make seventeen times the amount a criminal lawyer is
paid working for the state. On top of the salary, that criminal
lawyer has to deal with a lifetime of stress and sacrifice. And the
lawyer’s salary is supplied by tax dollars, a tiny drop in an ocean
of dues and fees and taxes. That’s the kind of revenue that should
make the IRS burst out laughing!"

Liza smiled weakly at
Ross's comment and said, "I'm disappointed too."

Ross sighed and said,
"I don't think disappointed even covers it, Lizzy. We drive over
twelve hours from Ohio to Salem, where they supposedly have the
best baby-making clinic in the country, only to be told that we
don't have a shot in hell of ever actually conceiving our own
kid."

"They didn't say that!"
Liza protested.

Ross glared at her as
long as he dared before returning his eyes to the road. After an
awkward and silent moment, Liza did begrudgingly rephrase, "Well...
it wasn’t quite as explicit as that…”

"Liza, they basically
said the odds of us ever conceiving a baby are worse than the
Redskins ever winning the Super Bowl. Genetically, it’s just not
going to happen.” He chuckled sarcastically before adding, “We’re
just not built to be parents.”

Liza hung her head, and
Ross immediately regretted his harsh words.

"Honey, hey, I'm
sorry–" he tried to apologize.

"Don't!" Liza cut him
off. "You're right. They had absolutely no right to speak to us
like that. And to have the audacity to ask for more money to try
experimental protocols on me? Please!"

"I know," said Ross
with a disgruntled sigh, glad they’d redirected their frustration
away from each other. "Can you believe the nerve of those
people?"

Liza scoffed in
agreement.

Another awkward silence
hung over them until Liza asked, "So what do we do now?"

Ross proposed, "Well,
we could always adopt."

Liza stared at him and
said hopefully, "You’d be okay with that?”

Ross nodded.

Her mood fell just as
quickly as it had risen, though. “You know how hard it is to adopt.
Who knows if we’d ever be approved, and even if we were, I imagine
it could take years.”

“It’s a chance at
least. That’s better than what they gave us at the
clinic.”

"That's not the point!"
Liza shouted.

"Well, what else do you
want?" Ross demanded angrily. "What else can I possibly
do?"

Liza just shrugged and
turned to stare back out her window. Several minutes later she
said, "I really don't know."

Ross sighed and just
kept driving.

They drove another
twenty minutes in complete silence before Liza finally said, "There
is one thing I do want."

Ross didn’t know how to
feel about anything just then. Exasperated by the whole scenario,
he asked, "And what is that?"

"I want..." Liza
started, "I want a sign."

"A sign?" Ross asked
curiously.

"Yes! A sign!" Liza
said excitedly, with the hint of a smile gracing the corners of her
lips. "A sign of what we should we do."

Ross glanced at his
wife long enough to send her a look as if she’d just asked him to
pick up a car or fly off into space. “A sign. Really?”

She nodded excitedly.
Despite himself, her enthusiasm was infectious. He broke into a
broad grin himself as he prodded her, “Would you prefer a sign from
God or aliens? Or are you not too picky?”

The tension finally
broken, she laughed and replied, “Oh whichever.”

“From the future,
perhaps?”

“That sounds positively
lovely, Ross.”

Ross chuckled,
shrugged, and said, "You never really know Liza, we might just get
a sign. The real questions are where, when, and how on Earth will
we be able to tell. I think the real trick to… to signs,” he paused
to chuckle again before continuing, “is knowing how to interpret
them."

"Well, I think you
summed it up," said Liza, eyes tired but cheerful. "We’ll never
really know, at least until we get it."

It was centered a
distant way off, yet the flash of white light was so brilliant that
both Ross and Liza instinctively jerked their eyes away. Ross
slowed the car and pulled to the shoulder, knowing there wasn’t
anybody behind him and not wanting to cause an accident, but not
every driver on the road was as mindful. When his vision cleared,
he was greeted by an F250 barreling down on him and his
wife.

Ross yanked the wheel
to the right and stepped on the accelerator. Liza screamed as her
husband drove them off the paved road and right into the forest.
Either by his keen eye or miraculous good fortune, they found a
narrow gap between trees. With the threat of a head-on collision
behind them, he slammed the brakes.

The car skidded on
rough dirt smeared with wet autumn leaves, but ultimately halted
safely. After a few silent did-that-really-just-happen moments,
Ross let out a whoop of excitement and burst out laughing. Liza
merely exhaled a sigh of relief.

"You okay, baby?" Ross,
still grinning, asked Liza.

"I wish you wouldn't
call me that," she replied.

"I'll take that as a
'yes,'" said Ross with a big grin.

Liza scowled and
changed the subject. "What in the world was that?"

"I have no idea," Ross
said.

"You think we should
check it out?" Liza asked rhetorically, unbuckling her
seatbelt.

"No," Ross replied,
which earned him a sharp look of disbelief from his wife. He went
on, "I think I should check it out."

She rolled her eyes,
but nodded. She’d learned long ago that there wasn’t much point
arguing with her husband once he’d decided to play the role of
macho alpha male.

Ross reached into the
glove compartment and pulled out his mace.

After flicking off the
safety latch, he got out of the car, and paused dramatically with
the door held open.

“Stay here," he
instructed his wife.

Liza restrained herself
from chuckling at his bravado.

Before going into law
as a profession, Ross had served a tour of duty in the Air Force.
He had seen spotlights, flares, and all kinds of explosions, but he
had never witnessed a light which was so brilliant and so piercing
from so far away as the one he’d just seen.

After ticking off all
the likely causes he could brainstorm, he started thinking of
unlikely ones.

“Maybe it was aliens,”
he muttered under his breath, only to sarcastically add, "Ross, if
you really want aliens to be the perpetrators of crimes transfer to
Area 51."

He chuckled to himself
and started to relax.

His guard came back up
fast, though, when he noticed a soft, otherworldly whimpering sound
from somewhere nearby. After a bit of sleuthing he realized it was
coming from inside what looked like a shallow cave. The eerie sound
was echoing off the stone walls, which confused his sense of
direction. With a hard look in his eye and his can of mace raised,
he edged into the cavern.

The setting sun cast
almost no light through the east-facing cave mouth, and it took
Ross’s eyes a few moments to adjust. What he saw perplexed him. He
saw nothing.

“Well that’s… weird,”
he mumbled.

Perhaps responding to
his voice, the whimper returned, and now inside the cave, Ross was
able to make it out much more clearly. It sounded like a
child.

Casting his gaze
downward, he saw a little girl curled up, wrapped in brown linen
which blended almost perfectly with the dirty stone floor. From her
size, she couldn’t have been over six months old.

At first Ross simply
stared in shock. He’d been prepared for bandits or some sort of
vicious mutant creature. A child threw him off.

He checked her
immediately, but found no signs of abuse or neglect, aside from
having been abandoned alone in a cave. Near as he could tell, she
was perfectly healthy and sound. Beyond that initial assessment,
though, he was at a total loss for how to handle the girl. He
completed a sweep of the cave, finding nothing out of the ordinary.
It did not take long. Once again, he looked down at the girl in
complete disbelief.

“Now what on earth are
you doing here?” Ross asked the baby as he again crouched down
beside her. As a lawyer for the District Attorney’s office, he had
come across too many unfortunate case of abandonment. A child comes
to someone who does not necessarily want it, but has it anyway.
Later the person comes to learn that having a child is not like
having a complacent slave or an obedient dog. Then, rather than put
it up for adoption, the freaks just leave their child somewhere to
die.

That pattern just
didn’t fit the facts in this case, though, Ross noted curiously.
He’d already seen that the little girl looked surprisingly well
nourished and completely free of signs of abuse. “Camping, maybe?”
Ross asked himself, or perhaps the baby. Either way, he didn’t get
a useful response. “That wouldn’t explain the flash, anyway,” he
thought aloud.