Earth's Requiem(74)
“Something else in the journals?”
She sat on his lap and wove her arms around him. He pulled her close, and the fear that had surged at his last words subsided a little. Laying a hand against her head, he turned her face so he could kiss her.
“Mo croi,” he murmured, pulling away. “Keep everyone safe.” He set her on her feet, got to his, and walked purposefully from the kitchen. “You’ll have time while I’m gone,” he called over his shoulder. “You can read her journals for yourself.”
“Wh-Where will your body be?”
“In our bed, lass.” He did turn then and gave her a broad wink. “Take good care of it.”
She curled herself around his body through the night. The next day, she settled in with Marta’s journals. What she found was so unsettling that it was hard to keep reading. Once she’d lost Ryan, there had been a part of the woman that went mad—or became highly irrational, to put a kinder spin on things. Aislinn wondered how Marta had managed to hide her craziness from the Old Ones.
Other than occasional trips outside, Rune never left her side. Bella flew into the bedroom and stood watch over Fionn. Aislinn tried to interest her in water and food, but the bird ignored her.
On a hunch, Aislinn riffled through drawers in the study and found photographs she assumed were Marta. She considered double-checking her assumption with Rune, but the wolf was edgy. He seemed to be asleep for the moment, and she didn’t want to bother him.
The pictures were vaguely disturbing. Marta had been a tall, muscular woman, with long, coppery hair and clear, green eyes. She was built more like a man than a woman, with broad shoulders and a square jaw. In the pictures that included her husband, she towered over him by a good six inches. Aislinn squeezed her eyes shut to clear the afterimage from one particular photograph and then looked at it again. She shook her head. No matter which angle she chose, Marta didn’t look entirely human. Something about her eyes and her posture were almost more Lemurian than human.
After searching further, Aislinn found family photographs with an older couple. Who were they? Marta’s parents? She didn’t look much like either of them, but perhaps she’d been adopted. Aislinn rubbed her eyes. The older couple had a distinctly alien cast as well. She shoved the pictures back in their drawer, feeling uneasy.
“Yeah,” Aislinn mumbled, “if those were Marta’s parents, what happened to them?” They couldn’t have been more than about sixty or so. Had they been forced into the vortex, too? Returning her attention to the lines of careful script in Marta’s journals, Aislinn hunted for something, anything, about the woman’s parents. Coming up dry, she started on some of the earlier years. When she surfaced, light was fading from the sky. Pushing heavily out of the upholstered leather chair she’d sat in for hours, she stretched and walked into the kitchen, where she flipped on the tap and splashed cold water on her face to clear her head.
She’d found references—lots of them—to Marta’s parents in those earlier journals. Apparently, they’d also been doctors—a pediatrician and a surgeon. But the references had ceased abruptly the year Marta finished medical school and began her residency in Internal Medicine. Why? What the fuck happened to them? The damned Surge wouldn’t happen for another ten years. The elder couple’s disappearance would also have predated Rune, who likely wouldn’t know anything, even if she asked. Marta hadn’t had children, and she’d done a hell of a job playing overprotective mother with her wolf.
Marta’s parents weren’t the only element missing from the last thirteen years of journal posts. Other than a brief notation about her marriage and another about her husband’s death, Marta hadn’t written anything of substance about Ryan, either. Why? What was it about him that Marta didn’t want to risk putting on paper? Speaking of that, why was she still using paper and not doing her journaling electronically? Unless they were hidden away extremely well, Aislinn hadn’t found a computer anywhere in the house. Not that it would have mattered, since the electricity to power them was long gone, but the lack of such a common device was another unexplained oddity.
Nibbling on leftovers from the night before, she tried to make sense of what she’d read. Fionn had been right about one thing. The urgency in Marta’s postings had escalated dramatically right before her death. It was hard to say whether something real lurked behind her frantic scribblings, or whether her insanity was spiraling out of control.
Because she couldn’t do anything but wait, Aislinn culled through the study and selected an old underground novel, Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright. By the time she realized it was a fictionalized account of a place like Mu—or maybe Atlantis—the story had sucked her in. She read herself to sleep, lying next to Fionn. When morning came and he hadn’t returned, she began to worry. She’d had a restless night, waking with her heart in her throat twice, sure Fionn was dead. She’d even called up her mage light to look at his body to make sure he was still breathing. After the second time that happened, she gave up on sleep and went outside into the dawn with Rune. She tried to get Bella to come along, but it was like the raven had turned into a statue. Who knew? Maybe she’d sent her astral self after Fionn.