Mark Teppo - Heartland

I wasn't going to be that guy this time.

But Philippe knew that, which is why he offered me everything. He knew this was a carrot that would entice me.

There were two carrots, actually. And the combination of both would make me overlook the danger of returning to Paris. We make our own traps. Philippe was well aware of how readily we would walk into disasters we knew we should avoid. He knew, better than any of us, how little effort it took to sway us onto a different path than the one we meant to follow.

Here, little one, take my hand. I will show you the way.

He knew. He knew, beneath all my bluster and outrage, I had wanted this. I had wanted a focus. That was the way my thread was wound. It wouldn't take much to twist me to his plan, and it hadn't.

"Stay here." Antoine admonished me as he put on his coat.

"And do what?" I asked. "Meditate?"

"If it helps."

"Where are you going?"

"I am a Protector, Michael. I have responsibilities. The Hierarch is dead. The rank will react, especially this close to spring, and I must be visible. We need to know what the rest will do, how much they will panic." He looked at me, his eyes guarded. "A lot of them will be thinking about it."

The Crown.

Each spring the Hierarch underwent a ceremonial renewal, a Coronation that was part pomp and circumstance and part cosmological rebirth. With Philippe gone, the question was: Who was to fill that void?

Without a clearly designated heir-me notwithstanding-the rank was going to turn into a chaotic mess of egos and agendas. Antoine was right. We needed information. Who was going to make a play for the Crown? Who had the resources to take it? Who wanted it?

"How long?" I asked.

He shrugged, adjusting the cuffs of his coat. "I don't know."

An honest answer, but one that made the Chorus tighten against my spine. Too much uncertainty. Too much waiting. Too many things out of my control.

Antoine wasn't about to tie me down; he was, after all, leaving me on my own recognizance, which meant one of two things: a) he expected me to stay like a good house pet; or b) he expected me to bolt.

"I'll be here," I said as he walked toward the front of the narrow apartment.

He paused at the base of the stairs that led up to the street level and looked back, his eyes violet with light.

We both knew I was lying.

I remained in the single hallway of the apartment, listening to the sound of his boots against the stairs. The basement apartment wasn't much more than a trio of rooms off a central hallway, and it must have been in the center of the block as there were no windows. Not in the bedroom; not in the tiny kitchenette; not in the bathroom. It was a box, hidden away from the world. Good, if you wanted to be invisible; bad, if you were worried about someone coming after you.

A door at the top of stairs opened, spilling light down the wooden steps. For a second, the noisy sounds of Paris tumbled down into the basement, but then Antoine shut the door, and everything became quiet again. Muted and distant. Separated from the world. Isolated in this boxlike prison.

If he had wanted to kill me, he would have done so while I was unconscious, or he would have left me in the road near the train tracks. A gift for Henri. But he hadn't. He had ditched his ex-girlfriend, and spirited me away to this safe house. For which I was supposed to be grateful. I was supposed to sit tight and wait.

Didn't he know better by now?

He does, the Chorus whispered.

My head was starting to throb, a massive headache sneaking into the forebrain. I was wound tight, and the screws had only been tightening since I had gotten on the plane in Seattle.

I will not be your agent of vengeance.

That is all you will ever be, an echo of Philippe, twisting through the Chorus.

The images cycled through my head as I rubbed my face: Philippe, sitting in the chair; the flickering streamers of light caught in the fireplace; the suppurating blackness of his leg; the pale skin of the crown of his head; his pupils, dilating as the spike of the Chorus split his heart. These were my memories, and while my rank was no longer recognized by the society, these images were a True Record. I was the sole Witness to the Hierarch's death, and even though the rites of combat said I took the spoils, no one would believe me. Which meant that the body politic was headless, and like Antoine had said, who knew how stable that body was going to be.

The Coronation. Via the network of bound memory, I knew what happened after the death of the Hierarch. There was a resurrection, a ceremonial recognition where the new leader was Crowned. Recognized by both the rank and by some external agency. Some sort of institutional memory, a historical legacy that was passed on to each new Hierarch. The Spirit of the Land. The Secrets of the Ages. The Truth to the Inner Mystery. The combination to the safe in the back room where all the deadly occult paraphernalia was held. Or some such thing.

There were other secrets too, hidden by the noise of the Chorus. The Qliphoth had hidden in that confusion and darkness; after I had scoured them out, it was as if I had driven the rats out of the basement, but the room was still there. Dark, inviting, and who knew how far back it went. All I did know was that Philippe was in there, and he had locked the door shut from the inside. I didn't have the strength to force my way in, nor did I have a key.

That damn key. Did Antoine know what it was for?

I showered, discovered there was nothing edible in the refrigerator, and used that as a convenient excuse to walk away from the safe house. Pants, shoes, shirt, wallet, tarot deck, crawling paranoia about being in the heart of the enemy's empire: everything I needed. I left the passport-no point in carrying the false identity anymore; not when they knew I was here-and my jacket. The burn pattern on the front would draw too much attention. I could pick up another at a shop somewhere. I went up the stairs, out the front door, and found myself in a narrow alley.

Residential neighborhood. The surrounding buildings were gray concrete, the sort of invisible architecture thrown up during the bleaker part of the Cold War. Windows, placed in precise rows, were afterthoughts, squares cut out of the foreboding walls. The accreted history of the lower classes, packed tightly together in little boxes. The Chorus didn't sense any danger, nor any watchers behind the curtains of the numerous dull windows along the alley. I turned left and started walking.

Eventually, I'd spot a landmark. This was Paris, after all. You're never far from a picturesque monument or historical landmark.

In this case, the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. One of the world's largest cemeteries, Pere Lachaise was a nineteenth-century solution to the problem of overflowing churchyards, and had become a status symbol in the subsequent centuries. You weren't somebody until you were buried at Pere Lachaise.

I followed the old stone wall, tracing the rectangular shape of the city of the dead until I found the collection of shops clustered around one of the cemetery's entrances. I needed a few things. Coffee, coat, cell phone: Maslow mapped to the twenty-first century. Start at the bottom, work up.

After procuring the items on my list, I settled at a sidewalk table, outside the Brasserie du Pere Lachaise. The wind was light, from the north, and the sun was out, so it wasn't too cold. Winter was dying; spring was coming.

The Chorus reminded me of the field beyond Philippe's farmhouse. In the spring, it exploded with wild flowers.

In the spring . .

The cell phone I picked up at the shop was a pay-as-you-go type and I had put a couple hundred minutes on it while at the store. It included, among what seemed like a dozen other functions I'd never need, a calendar that informed my jet-lagged body that today was March 19. The spring equinox was tomorrow.