“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” came a familiar voice.
A grumbled whisper, “Chryslantha?”
The sizzling odor of sausage and maple syrup wafted through the covers. Cal shut his eyes. The bedsheet pulled back, like a magic trick, to reveal him. He peeked to find a Cheshire Cat hovering over him.
“No, it’s not Christmas,” his wife said. “Just thought you might like breakfast in bed.” She pulled the drapes back the rest of the way and flooded the room with light. Cat notched the window open. A cold breeze blew through the room. “Sorry,” she said. “Wanted some fresh air. Didn’t think it’d be arctic. I can get the fire going.”
“What time is it?” he rasped.
“Almost ten. You haven’t slept this late since you did twelve to eights.”
Cal pulled himself up and let Cat prop the pillow behind him. “Thanks,” he said. “What’s with the room service? Something else happen?”
“Can’t a wife spoil her husband once in a while?” She was glad, he realized. Grateful to still have her spouse. “We’ve never been to Scotland, you know.”
And technically, they still hadn’t. The only access to the bedroom was through Ben’s bungalow in Puerto Rico. Entry from the castle itself had been sealed with stone and mortar years earlier. To get to the moors they’d have to rappel three hundred feet down from the window and avoid the moat, which doubled as a sewage outlet.
Cat rested the bed tray over Cal’s thighs and lifted the warming covers from the plates.
“Have some?” Cal offered.
“No.”
“Did you eat already?”
“Skipped. Having trouble keeping things down. Probably nerves.”
“Hmm,” Cal said, swallowing java. One thought, a minor one until this moment, rose above the din in his brain. “Was that a pregnancy test box I saw in the bathroom trash at home?”
Cat was silent. She sat on the bed facing away from him with her hands on her lap.
“You coppers never miss a detail.”
“Wouldn’t be very good if we did. Is there something I should know?”
“The test results were ruined in the fight. I don’t know for sure, but it sure feels like…” She didn’t finish. Cal edged up to her and stroked her shoulders. “I didn’t want to add to our problems,” she said. “Not in the middle of all this.”
He kissed her on the nape of her neck. “You’ve always been the solution to my problems,” he said.
Chryslantha marched herself to the forefront of Cal’s brain. For a moment, it was her scent he smelled, her voice he heard. Someone had hooked his navel from the inside and was pulling it back toward his spine. He smiled at his wife. Could Cat see the other woman in his eyes?
“What’s the plan?” she asked him.
“We poke around the neighborhood up here, find a lead on the boy. Then, back to New York. The others from our group might head to the city looking for me.” As an afterthought he added, “The ones who are still alive.”
“And then?”
“Then we find the boy.”
“And then?”
“One thing at a time.”
“Let’s say you’re successful. Do we take the kid from his legal parents? Do we raise him ourselves? Do we move to his town? Buy the house next door to his? Do we bring him to the Bronx?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find him first.”
“Do you have to take him back to Aandor? Or can Lelani do it?”
“Let’s not talk about this right now.”
“If not now, when? What’s the plan? Are we actually making it up on the fly? We got lucky finding Ben and Helen up here.”
Not so lucky for Ben and Helen.
“Who knows when we’ll be able to catch our breath again,” Cat continued.
“I’ll know more later…”
“Have you made a decision about going back?”
“Can’t we drop this, Cat?”
“Drop this?”
Cat stood up from the bed. She rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled, while she made her way to the doorway. Cal had a tinge of guilt. She was so distraught, she was out of character. The woman he married would never drop anything.
Suddenly, Cat stopped and turned to face him. “You’re the guy who had every stage of his career with the NYPD mapped out before he graduated the academy!” she said. “You’re the guy who had the colors of our apartment picked out before we even bought the building!”
Cat circled slowly back around toward Cal, still lying immobile in bed.
“You’re the guy who plays chess five moves ahead of his turn. You have your endgame picked out after the first move and suddenly, in real life, you don’t know what we’re doing tomorrow or the next day. Are you delaying decisions you don’t want to face, Cal, or have you made them already and don’t want to tell me?” Cat demanded, hovering over him.
Cal would have preferred the battle at Gagarnoth to this moment. His back was again against a cliff, except he couldn’t slash and hack his way out of this trap-he was an immovable object confronted by an unstoppable force… a slip of a woman who held the key to his heart. The problem was his heart now had a second lock, a backdoor key that led to his past, and more and more it looked like both keys needed to be turned in unison to keep him whole, like submarine commanders launching a ballistic missile.
“The first one,” Cal finally said.
“The first what?”
“I’m delaying decisions I don’t want to face. All options look like I’ll have to go back if I’m successful. And I have to be successful.”
“Or die trying?”
“Or die trying,” he confirmed. “There are millions of people depending on me. Aandor is a city that became a nation that became an empire. A whole society. The entire balance of power is unraveling there. We need to preserve the succession and reclaim our seat of power over the empire to preserve peace on the continent. My family is depending on me.”
The words “my family” struck Cat like a slap. She and Bree had been his whole family until yesterday.
Cat took a moment and then asked, “Is there room for your daughter-for me-in your new life? In whichever world you choose?”
“There has to be. I’ll make it so. I have to sort things out first, then come back for you.”
Cat stepped back from the bed, arms tense, fists clenched. A tear broke through her veneer.
“Cat… it’s complicated.”
“There’s no guarantee that you’d even live through this war!” she said. “You could be hacked to pieces with those fucking meat cleavers you medieval jocks use.”
“As opposed to getting blown apart cleanly in the Bronx by a drug dealer’s bullet.”
“Don’t be smart with me, Cal! You don’t have the right to be smart with me! If you did manage to live through that hell, if you go back, there’s a good chance that the next time I see you Bree will have her own kids and I’ll be an old crone. What the fuck am I supposed to do for the next thirty years? Pretend you’re dead? Live my years never knowing for sure? What about Bree? What about our child inside me?”
“WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO, CAT?”
Cal shoved the food tray off the bed. He leaned forward challenging Cat for answers.
“Tell me what to do!” he persisted. “Should I ignore that the prince exists? Go back to the Bronx and take my ESU training? Retire in twenty years with a beer gut, coach Little League, walk my daughter down the aisle, bounce fat grandkids on my lap, and fish until I keel over in my rowboat? Be content that I led a good life?”
“Fuck you,” Cat said, in tears. For a moment, Cal thought she would slap him. Instead, she hugged him hard. “Yes. Damn it. Yes!” she whispered in his ear. And even as she repeated the word, Cal sensed Cat knew better. That she would never respect him or love him again with the same fervor if he could turn his back on his family and his responsibilities that way, even for her sake. Her tears rained on his shoulder.
“I love you, Catherine,” he said.
“I know you do,” she said, sniffling. “I’m just trying to figure out what our life is becoming. Has become. Will things ever be the same again?”
Cal took a moment to think things through. He was figuring out his strategy as much for himself as to give Cat her due. She deserved a straight answer. He got out of bed, pulling the comforter behind him for a cover. He threw kindling on the dying fire and a big log on top of that, then took a chair next to the hearth. Cat sat on the stone platform in front of the fireplace facing him.