The 13th Descent: Book One of The Rosefire Trilogy (20 page)

I turn to protest, but he has already disappeared around the corner.
The thought of being up before dawn instantly makes me feel tired, but I don’t want to excuse myself so soon after Josh and give everyone the wrong impression and false hope.

With a stuffed belly, a full heart, and a restless mind dulled by two glasses of red wine, I set my alarm for four thirty a.m., curl up into a ball and instantly jump from the edge of consciousness into sleeping like the dead. But it isn’t the piecing siren of my phone alarm that wakes me in the dark hours of the morning, it’s the balls of paper hitting me in the face. 

“What the
hell?” I growl at the shadowy figure standing at the threshold of my open door.

“Morning!
” Josh chirpily whispers.

“What time is it?” I moan, feeling around
my bedside table for my phone. Squinting through the light it gives off, I see that it’s “Four a.m.!” I squawk. “No way. Sunrise isn’t until four fifty five. I checked. Come back in half an hour,” I grumble, snuggling back into a ball.  

One by o
ne, the paper balls keep hitting me in the ear, on the cheek, in the ear again, and I soon find that hiding under the sheet doesn’t help to make it any less annoying. Now fully awake and extremely pissed off about it, I yell out, “For God’s sake!” throwing the covers off me and dramatically swinging my legs over the side of the bed.

“This is not the way I wanted to wake you, but I had no choice,” Josh says with a smirk in his voice.

“Yeah, what’s with the paper balls anyway…pain in the arse,” I mutter, kicking them out of my way as I stomp my way to the en suite, slamming the door like a full stop.

“Still a morning person I see,” I hear him say from far away.

“Are you still standing in the doorway?” I grouchily call out.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I told you. I won’t step foot in your room unless I’m invited.”

Reminded of the first time I invited him anywhere, I sigh through the grin creeping across my face. I finish washing my hands, open the bathroom door, stick my sleep mussed head through it to say, “Only if you know the password,” quickly closing it again to hide the blush the memory is bringing on.

“Clue?” he calls out.

“Where I chipped in my front tooth,” I call back.

I hear him chuckle
. “Olive garden,” he announces.

“You may enter,” I happily
say: happy that he remembered, and happy as I wince through every detail of our first kiss under the big olive tree, when our teeth gnashed together and I chipped one of the big ones at the front, and how, after a few more tries at getting it right, we rarely came up for air. “I’m going to have a very quick shower, and I’ll be right with you, OK?” I call out, deciding to make it a cool one to avoid adding to the humidity in the air and the heat in my cheeks.

“OK,” he calls back.

A few footsteps later, I hear the light thud of paper balls being shot into the waste paper basket.

Within fifteen minutes, I emerge from the bathroom,
showered with my teeth brushed wearing a red tank top, denim shorts, sandshoes, my hair up in a ponytail, and now my morning grimace has been washed away, a smile on my face.

“Feeling better?” he asks.

“Much,” I answer.

“I can’t believe you’re still like a bear with a sore head in the mornings,” he says with a
smirk.

“Having the wine last night didn’t help,” I point out.

“Not used to it?”

“I
don’t usually drink,” I say defensively. “Aunt Rydia wanted me to try some of the wine from her vineyard, and somehow, a taste turned into a glass, and a glass turned into two.”

“Fair enough,” he says. “But, I wasn’t implying anything,” he adds, a bit taken aback.

I shake my head and sigh. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just, well, sometimes I get a bit touchy when the topic turns to drinking.”

“There’s obviously a story there.”

“There is,” I say, looking down at my feet.

“And
when you’re ready to tell it, I’m here and ready to listen,” he says as he takes my hand and gently strokes the top of it with his thumb.

I still at his warm, familiar touch,
scared that if I move, he’ll stop, but then he pulls my hand up towards his chest, and I embarrassingly snort my disappointment when I realise it was to check my watch. He pulls a curious face, and I answer him by shaking my head dismissively, quickly pointing out that, “Sunrise is in twenty five minutes. Are you ready to go?”

“I am. Let’s do this,” he eagerly answers.

I reluctantly step out of his personal space to retrieve my messenger bag, and like the Flash, I zip straight back into it. Being this close to, and comfortable with, a gorgeous, kind, smart, and insanely talented international superstar who feels as drawn to me as I am to him is downright addictive, and the insistent little voice that implies I am an imposter is still relatively easy to silence.  

He holds the door open for me and closes it behind us, and in a tender, familiar gesture, he opens his left hand an
d offers it to me. Smiling goofily, I take it, and as the Castle sleeps, snores, and creaks all around us, we quietly make our way up the hallway and down the stairs.

As we emerge from behind the South-W
est wall into the entrance hall, Josh suddenly stops and stills like he is taking in its grandeur for the first time. His reaction reminds me that this is the first time he has stayed in the Castle, and that he hadn’t even seen the first rooms – the Heart rooms - until last night, because the building of them started shortly after he died.

  He leads me
over to the centre of the compass and turns me to face him. I follow is gaze upwards and stare up at the two of us encased in a timeless halo of shimmering amber. He smiles at our overhead reflection and says, “Ah. Now, this I remember. This, I remember well.”

“Me, too,” I gasp
, remembering that no matter where or what time I find myself in, I always rediscover that I’ve never stopped being at the heart of a majestic, never-ending circle of golden light.

Josh
’s attention is suddenly drawn outside the reflected circle of amber and over to the fire light emanating from the Mike’s corner. He levels is gaze, releases my hand and walks towards the portrait of his brother, his cousin, his friend. After a silent moment, he says without turning around, “He is the only one of the Four I truly know, and trust,” his words heavy with the nostalgia.

“And Craig too,” I point out.

“Yes, I know. Craig is a good man. But Mike is the only one of the Four who knew me as the man I was then.”

“Well, yes, that’s true, but-”

“Do you realise that I haven’t met most of the people coming here tomorrow,” he says as he turns and
glances at each of the three corners in front of him. 

“I know,” I say, looking
up at him and the towering picture of Mike at his back.

“So why am I even here? I have no idea…about any of this,” he mutters, more to himself than
to me.

After a few momen
ts of contemplative silence, he says, “You and Mike have.”

“Me and
Mike have what?”

“Met them all.”

“Yes. Yes, we have,” I agree. “But we are on our thirteenth time around. You are only on your second.”

“True.” He pauses. “But that proves my point exactly. Tell me again, why am I here?”

I move to stand before him and medieval Mike, I say the words I know to be truth. “I wish I could, Josh. But I can say for certain that all this has to do with who you were then, who you are now, and who you want to be. That, and for over two thousand years, the Tor People have come here, Midsummer after Midsummer, in memory of you, of me - of us, and to help us preserve the truth and bring light to the darkness.”

“We must have made quite an impact,” he says, his eyes
once again shining like precious metal.

“We did. And I
, we, believe that you’re back because now is the time to finish what we started all those centuries ago,” I announce with unfettered certainty.

Looking back at
Mike’s portrait and back at me, he asks, “Do you love him?”

Now is not
the time for unchecked feelings. “Yes,” I answer without hesitation.             

“As you loved me?”

“I am starting to think that no two loves are the same,” I say.

“You’re just figuring that out?”

“Sadly, yes,” I confess. “But, do you know what is even sadder? I have been waiting to experience a love like ours for the last two thousand years.”

“With no luck?” he asks,
placing his hands on my shoulders as his molten eyes look into mine.

Staring back,
I slowly shake my head, no.

“I’m not surprised,” he says.

Baulking, I ask, “Really? Why?”

“Because I was your first love, and you can only have one of those,” he says.

Suddenly I notice that candle light that once helped us to see through the darkness is slowly being superseded by the sun’s morning rays as they climb the glass, bringing life to the solid colours of Avira’s window.

“The sunrise!” we both exclaim as we
turn and run for my bear of an uncle’s corner. Josh throws open the front door, and we clamber out on to the landing and turn to our faces to the East.

W
e lean into each other and watch the summer sun ascend, my eyes widening with remembrance, hope and anticipation as our world’s hottest star makes its neon appearance, blazing its trail of fire across the waking horizon.   

Josh kisses my hair and says, “Happy Midsummer’s Eve, Ren.”

“Happy Midsummer’s Eve, Josh,” I breathe as the dance of my beloved dead suddenly brushes across the back of my neck, and a chill of forewarning whispers that this may be the last time we stand in the presence of a rising Solstice sun.

xxXxx

I ask Josh how he would like to spend our day together.

“You’re the tour guide” he says.

Good, I think, as I continue to map out in my mind how long we’ve got, the places I’d like to revisit with him, and where we should start first, until my thought process is suddenly interrupted by the loud growl of Josh’s stomach.

We both laugh. “Enough said,” I say. “Let’s start with the market.”

With Josh donning a baseball cap and a pair of aviator sun glasses so he won’t be recognised, we stroll to end of the laneway, turn left into Main Street and follow it all the way into the centre of the village, to where some of the market vendors are still setting up their stalls.

Delicious
overlapping smells of bread baking, ripening fruit, burnt sugar, cut flowers and essential oils have my head pivoting in every direction and my mouth salivating for something warm, doughy and sweet. I start to pull Josh towards the bakery. When he realises where we are heading, he is quick to pick up the pace.

We are immediately served by
a lady I assume is Mrs. Baker. “You two are out early,” she remarks. “What’ll be, loves?”

After hungrily scanning all of the yumminess on offer, I ask for, “A chocolate-berry croissant, please,” trying not to drool all over myself.

“Make it two,
please,” Josh says, opening his wallet.

As Josh orders some extra bits and pieces and
politely pays the baker’s wife - who hasn’t blinked since she got an eyeful of Josh, and is shamelessly close to drooling all over herself - I turn away from the hopeful cougar to gaze out across the market place slowly filling with the first shoppers of the day to see a short weedy man with a black mop top, bomber jacket, and chunky boots hurrying past the back of the pavilion and out of sight.

“I think I just saw
Zach,” I turn and say to Josh.

“Yeah? Where?” he asks, craning his neck in the direction I’m looking.

“I just saw him walking past the back of the pavilion there,” I say, pointing. “It looked like he was in a hurry.”

“Huh,” Josh grunts, seemingly unfazed. “I guess he must be feeling better then,” he adds with a shrug.

We head over to a kiosk called Miss Moo-Moo’s Milkshakes, and after I buy a vanilla and cinnamon milkshake for me and a banana milkshake for Josh as well as some fruit cups from the green-grocer a couple of stalls down, we head out with our cold pack full of snacks and our back packs slung over our shoulders.

We spend
the morning visiting every significant place within walking distance I can think of that has been built between his last lifetime and this one which so far has included two farms, three churches, and the cemetery where none of our family lies, Aunt Rydia’s vineyard, cousin Ruzena’s well-known and breathtakingly beautiful rose garden, the community herb garden and the forest, all the while retelling my history with each place to the most attentive of listeners who openly takes great pleasure in my laughter and great sadness in my own.

B
ecause of his invigorating responsiveness, I am growing more and more animated around him: every part of me wanting to explain every detail so he can share in the experience. As he intently watches me, his emotional responses are reflected in his eyes as they flicker from hazel-grey to silver rimmed with amber, and back again. My heart leaps into my throat every time I see the shimmer return, knowing I’ve touched his soul as Ren, and not as his widow thirteen times removed.