Wilder (18 page)

Chapter 33

C
harisma hadn’t seen Dr. King for four days, but here he was in the Guardian cave, waiting for them as they descended. Dr. King stood on a chair by the table still littered with the remains of last night’s dinner. “I’m sorry I haven’t been down,” he said. “Up above, things are disintegrating. Gangs are roving the streets, raping and killing. They fear nothing except—”

“The demons?” Guardian asked.

“Exactly. Respectable people scarcely dare leave their homes. I’m working day and night.” Dr. King looked worried and harried, as if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders.

Ill at ease, Charisma stared down at the packed dirt floor.

While she had been down here with Guardian, talking and eating and making love, the city had been under attack. Civilization had been collapsing.

But she had an excuse. She had been ill. Really ill. Truly . . . fatigued.

Yet Amber watched her critically.

Taurean fidgeted by the entrance, studiously avoiding Charisma’s gaze.

Was Charisma guilty of shirking her duty? Should she be ashamed?

“But enough excuses.” Dr. King dismissed his own problems with a sweep of the hand. “When Moises heard you scream, he came for me. What happened?”

Guardian paced along the river, then back, as if his great strides would shake off the memories. “Another nightmare.”

“What did you dream?” Dr. King asked.

Would he answer? Would he tell Dr. King?

Everything was changing, and Charisma felt the pressure of fate pushing her, and Guardian, to a new moment.

Most of all, she felt . . .
heard
the thrumming of the earth grow louder, demanding she come below, into its heart.

“I dreamed the truth.” Guardian stopped and faced them. “I dreamed about the doctor who did
this
to me.”

“The surgery on your head?” Dr. King scrutinized Guardian, his dark gaze weighing and curious.

“The doctor who made me take this form.” Guardian swept his hand from his head to his toes.

As if the news rendered him weak, Dr. King sank onto the chair. “Do you know his name?”

Guardian turned away, as if the name were too bitter to speak.

“Smith Bernhard,” Charisma told Dr. King quietly.

“My God. Bernhard is insane.” Dr. King’s revulsion matched hers.

“You know him?” Charisma had never imagined such a link between Guardian and Dr. King.

“Smith was one of the doctors who worked in the hospital during my residency,” Dr. King said. “He wanted to . . . He tried to persuade me that I would do better to donate my body to science than get a degree in medicine.”

Charisma didn’t think she could be more horrified. Yet now . . . she was.

“We knew, all of us who worked with him, that he was up to something dreadful. One of the watchmen caught him experimenting on one of the coma patients. The administration hesitated to turn him in to the police.” Dr. King’s mouth twisted. “It would have reflected badly on the hospital’s reputation. By the time the police went to arrest him, he had disappeared. I hoped never to hear his name again.”

A movement caught her eye. She looked quickly and saw a man peering at her from behind a stone. He was handsome; his fresh complexion marked him as a young man. Yet he stared at her with eyes too anxious and a palpable apprehension, and when she stared back and smiled kindly, he slunk back behind his stone.

Moises. She thought he must be Moises.

“Tell me about the dream,” Dr. King said to Guardian, and listened without interrupting as Guardian told the tale.

After the first few words, Taurean stumbled closer, wringing her hands, and then stopped, transfixed by the story.

Amber sank to her knees, shaking and crying.

Charisma felt ill as she heard it all again.

Dr. King, too, looked sick, and when Guardian fell silent, Dr. King said, “Most physicians live to relieve suffering, but this . . . I have to apologize for my profession.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.” Guardian stepped forward. “You saved me, Doctor. If not for you, I would still be cringing in the dark.”

“I don’t believe that.” Dr. King shook his head. “You’ve got a strength of character that puts me in awe.”

“And yet I became what Bernhard demanded I become.” Guardian lifted his hands and looked at them, turning them back and forth as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.

“You did what you had to do to get away,” Dr. King said.

“See?” Charisma said softly. “I told you.”

Guardian held her gaze with his. “I can’t go back to my human form.”

“We don’t know that,” Dr. King said in a suitably pontifical doctor voice.

“
I
know.” Guardian lowered his hands and looked into Charisma’s eyes. “I need the pain and despair to tap into that wild part of me—and not even to be human again would I suffer so much.”

“No. Of course not.” Again, Dr. King stood on the chair. He leaned his hands on the table. “What else have you remembered?”

“I see faces in my head. I hear names and think I should know them.” With a cool gaze, Guardian looked far across the cave toward the high cluster of homes built into the wall. “But nothing more beyond those moments in the operating room.”

“I think that’s quite enough for one day,” Dr. King said. “You’ll find, now that the memories have started to return, that you’ll get them back in fits and bursts.”

“Great. I can’t wait to remember more of the same,” Guardian said sarcastically.

Charisma grinned. He sounded almost normal.

Dr. King turned to her. “While I’m here, I’d like to examine you.”

Instantly she said, “I’m fine.”

“Nevertheless, you’re my patient, and you went through a terrible ordeal yourself.” Dr. King reached into his bag and pulled out his stethoscope. “I won’t take a minute.”

As the doctor listened to Charisma’s heart, took her blood pressure, and looked into her eyes, Amber began to clear the table: carefully placing the burned-down candlesticks in boxes, throwing away the leftover shellfish, and boxing up the other remains to be given, Charisma knew, to the poor. As she answered Dr. King’s questions about any aches and pains, Moises scuttled up and grabbed the boxes, and put them in the basket that went back and forth to the surface.

Within minutes the table was back to normal, battered and plain, as if the most romantic evening of Charisma’s life had never occurred.

When Charisma left the cave, she knew she would leave no sign of her passage except a hollow indentation in the earth.

Had she been nothing but the briefest interlude in Guardian’s life? Was she to be wiped away as if she had never lived and almost died, fought and learned to love here in this cave?

Dr. King smugly said, “I have never seen anyone recover from the demon’s venom. Charisma, you are truly a miracle.”

“You’re a great doctor,” she said.

“Thank you. I pronounce you totally cured.” Dr. King beamed for another minute. Then his face fell, and he sighed. “But as much as I would like to stay down here, I have a patient load that would drop a lesser man.” He hopped off the chair and picked up his bag. “Still, everything today is a good thing. No man would want to remember what you have remembered, Guardian, but it’s a huge step on the path to recovery. And, Charisma, I am releasing you from my care.” With a satisfied good-bye, he left the cave.

Charisma sneaked a glance at Guardian.

He stood grim faced and silent.

He was probably absorbed in the new memories that crowded his mind. But did he realize what the doctor’s words meant to her? To them?

Taurean sidled up to Charisma and tugged at her sleeve. “I have a message from Irving.”

Charisma didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want the claims of her real life to intrude yet more. “Yes?”

“He said to tell you that the Chosen Ones are expected to return soon. Isabelle is coming home. You should come back to prepare.”

Charisma’s dismay compounded.

She wanted to see her friends.

But she wasn’t ready to leave.

She needed to confirm that Guardian was indeed Aleksandr Wilder, because the Chosen Ones needed Aleksandr.

But how could she do that if he couldn’t quite remember?

Did she dare tell the Chosen Ones what had transpired, knowing the anguish Guardian would feel when they stared? Kindly, of course. But they would stare. . . .

Yet did she dare not tell the Chosen Ones?

What if she was wrong?

Amber stepped forward, her smile tight and superior. “Guardian cannot take you to the surface. But if you will prepare, I’ll make sure you get home safely.”

Charisma looked helplessly at him.

“I
can’t
take you to the surface. The homing device . . .” His voice was stiff, his face emotionless, as if he were already separating himself from even the thought of her.

“I understand.” She straightened her shoulders. “Thank you for allowing me to recover down here with you. But it’s time for me to again become Charisma Fangorn, Chosen One. I have a job to do, and not much time left to do it. I have to go back.”

“Yes. You have to go back.” Guardian’s blue eyes flashed with, she thought, an echo of her anguish. “I’ll take you as far as I can.”

In a burst of inspiration, she said, “Take me as far as Davidov’s Pub. It’s underground. Nothing can harm you there.”

Chapter 34

T
he tunnels smelled of sweat and fear. Dirt shifted down, as if New York’s chaos weighed too heavily on the ground. A bird fluttered and swooped, desperate and trapped forever underground. The Belows huddled in small groups for safety, muttering fearfully, and watched Guardian and Charisma pass.

With each step, Guardian suffered a disorienting sense of déjà vu.

He had walked this tunnel before.

He had suffered the agonies of love before.

He had felt lost and uncertain before.

But he had never held Charisma’s hand as he walked before, had never looked at her sweetly rounded, pixieish face, had never experienced this roiling sense of despair and finality.

Could he bear to let Charisma go?

Would they ever see each other again?

How would he survive the loss?

She squeezed his hand in excitement. “That’s the brew pub,” she told him, and hurried her pace toward the short, wide steel door at the end of the long corridor.

Guardian had seen the door before, but never ventured close. Now he read the nameplate: D
AVIDOV’S
.

Charisma stepped up confidently and knocked.

As if their arrival had been anticipated, the door swung open at once.

Guardian’s jaw dropped. He’d been expecting a rotund German brewmaster in a dirty white apron.

Instead, he got Vidar Davidov: thirty years old, six and a half feet tall, two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle. Davidov’s casual, well-worn blue jeans and collared, short-sleeved navy blue shirt made Guardian think of a successful investment banker on the golf course. But his blue eyes and shoulder-length wavy blond hair probably made Charisma imagine a Viking warrior on the prow of a ship, holding a long sword and preparing to raid the villages.

“Charisma! We were worried.” The buff, handsome, confident bastard opened his arms wide.

Charisma walked into his embrace.

Davidov held her and rocked her, then lifted her chin and examined her face. “You look tired, little one.”

“I need a good night’s sleep and I’ll be fine,” she said.

“Hm. Yes. Come.” He wrapped his arm around Charisma’s shoulders and led her in. “It’s not safe out there.”

“Not even outside your pub?” Charisma asked in dismay.

“Inside no one can harm you,” he assured her, then flicked a glance at Guardian, a glance that felt as if it left Guardian naked and defenseless. “You, too, Guardian. Don’t linger on the doorstep. Come inside. Shut the door. Here you can relax at last.”

The guy knew his name. Okay, that wasn’t too weird—Davidov owned an underground bar; Guardian had been around for twenty months; it shouldn’t be too much of a mystery.

But Guardian didn’t like this Davidov, didn’t like the casual way he led Charisma to a barstool, didn’t like his self-assurance and his overweening masculinity. He made Guardian feel, not ugly and deformed, but young and foolish.

Either way, Guardian didn’t like it.

On the other hand, the inside of the pub gave him the impression he’d come home. Somehow, in this place belowground, Davidov had managed to make the single big room look like a forest, with oak-paneled walls and branches artfully arranged on the tall, fifteen-foot ceiling. Deep cushioned seats and padded leather benches surrounded the well-worn wooden tables.

Guardian took a long breath. The air smelled like woodlands in spring.

The pub would easily hold fifty.

They were the only ones inside.

And Davidov had known they were coming.

Weird.

“Come and sit at the bar,” Davidov said. “You can tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Charisma followed without hesitation.

Guardian stood in the middle of the room and tried to figure out how Davidov had created lighting that gave the impression of a sunshine-dappled day in a medieval forest.

“Come, Guardian.” Davidov’s authoritative voice was impatient. “We haven’t a lot of time left.”

“Are we in a hurry?” Guardian strolled to the bar, a slab of granite set on a dark wood base, and pulled back one of the padded leather swivel stools. Even for him, the seating was comfortable.

“There’re not many days left before Osgood extinguishes hope and civilization on earth. I would think the Chosen Ones wish to use their time wisely.”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Charisma said to Guardian. “He’s always rude to the guys.”

“Is it so surprising that I like women?” Davidov’s smile caressed her face. “They’re rational beings.”

“Men are not?” Guardian snapped.

“Not where women are concerned,” Davidov answered.

Guardian could hardly argue about that. But, for the way Davidov was staring at Charisma, Guardian wanted to punch out his headlights.

Just when Guardian was ready to launch himself over the bar, Davidov announced, “Charisma, for you, a nice, clean pilsner, with lots of strength-producing carbonation.”

“I knew beer gave me gas. I didn’t know I got strength, too.” She grinned at Guardian and touched his leg. “Doing okay?”

He nodded, because he couldn’t bluntly announce that losing her would never be okay.

They had to do this.

And he needed to stop being such a whiner.

“Gas is good. Healthy.” Davidov smiled as he poured a sparkling glass mug full from one of the kegs set into the wall. He set the foaming golden beer in front of her. “You’ll like this one.”

“I know I will.” She took a sip. “And I do.”

“For you,” Davidov said to Guardian, “at first, something mild. Soothing.” He poured from a different keg into a larger, heavy pewter tankard. “This is an ancient brew from Scandinavia, given to the warriors when they came home from their voyages. It’s always been one of my favorites.”

As Davidov placed it in front of Guardian, Charisma leaned up and over and stared into the contents. “It looks blue.”

“As blue as the place where the sky meets the sea,” Davidov agreed.

Guardian took a cautious sip. “Good. It tastes like . . . a summer sunset, or a breeze off the sea.” He glanced at Charisma. “Not that I remember either one of those things.”

She spoke in a rush, as if by impulse. “You
could
see those things. You could come to the surface with me.”

The knot in Guardian’s chest, the one that had begun to loosen, tightened once more. “They’ll come for me. Bernhard and the woman.”

“I’m one of the Chosen Ones. We’re good at what we do. You can stay at Irving’s house. We can protect you.”

Davidov wiped the taps with a towel, and listened.

Patiently, Guardian said, “Even if I wanted to be seen by your friends or anyone else in the city—and I do not—do the Chosen Ones really have the resources to protect me? As Davidov pointed out, you’re overextended and running out of time.” He pushed his tankard aside, did the same with her mug, faced her, and took her hands. “And if I leave, who’s going to protect the Belows?”

She shook her head and looked down. “I don’t know. But you and I . . .” She shook her head again.

He shouldn’t say it. He shouldn’t even suggest it. Yet he blurted, “You could stay down here. With me.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

Her hands convulsed in his, and she sounded wretched and upset. “If I stayed, one day I would give in.”

“To what?” What was she talking about?

Charisma withdrew her hands from Guardian’s grasp. “To the summons of the earth.”

Behind the bar, Davidov made a sound, like a wince made audible.

She turned to him.
“What?”

“Ask me a question,” he said.

“I don’t know who imposed the rule,” Charisma explained to Guardian, “or why, but Davidov can give answers only if someone asks the right question.”

In his turn, Guardian examined Davidov.

So this alluring creature wasn’t human, or if he was, he was bound by some magic.

That explained a lot.

“Ask,” Davidov told Charisma.

Charisma slid her mug close and took a long drink.

For strength, Guardian supposed.

Carefully she placed the mug on the bar. Spun it a few times while watching intently. And finally she said, “What does the earth want from me?”

“I don’t know,” Davidov replied.

“Helpful,” Guardian said.

“Unlike you youngsters, I reply only if I
know
the answer,” Davidov said with withering scorn.

Charisma placed a restraining grip on Guardian’s arm. “Vidar, what will happen if I ignore the call?”

“The earth cradles us, and to you she has given great gifts.” Davidov’s voice grew deep and lyrical. “A mere week ago you burrowed into her and she saved your life. What do you think will happen if you ignore the call? She is the goddess earth. She is powerful.”

“I know. I know I should obey. I know I’m needed.” Charisma whispered, “But I’m afraid.”

Her hand on Guardian’s arm trembled. “Afraid of what?” he asked.

Her eyes lost their focus, and she seemed almost to be talking to herself. “It’s so deep. The passages are dark and dangerous, and at the end . . . what is within is beautiful and terrible.”

“It’s perilous,” Davidov concurred. “Most who attempt to reach the gate never arrive. And if you do face the challenges and get inside, you’ll come back changed.”

Charisma’s trembling increased. “The earth wants a sacrifice. I don’t want to be that sacrifice.”