Mark Teppo - Heartland

"Absolutely. You can't trust them. Nothing but conjecture and speculation. Internet forum talk. All baseless."

"Really? What if they said you and I were sleeping together?"

"That was a long time ago, and no one knew."

She looked at me.

"Okay, Antoine knew. But he's not the gossipy type."

She turned the wheel and the tiny car slid through a gap between two parked cars. A narrow gate blocked our path, and with a mental command much like the opening spell she had used on the train, she exerted her Will on the barrier. It responded, rolling back on tiny wheels, and she eased the tiny car through the portal into the inner courtyard of the building. There were several other cars parked in the octagonal courtyard and she backed into an open space. The front pointed toward the gate. Quick escape, if we needed it.

Switching off the engine, she leaned toward me as she opened her door. Her eyes were dark pools, and the Chorus pulsated in time with her heartbeat. "It wasn't that long ago," she said quietly.

She led me up a flight of stairs to a tiny second-floor apartment. The living room looked out over the courtyard, and judging by the lack of a television and how empty the pair of bookcases were, as well as the position of the only comfortable chair in the room, watching the neighbors was the primary source of entertainment. A stub of a hallway led to a bathroom and a single bedroom. Around the corner from the door was a tiny nook and kitchen.

Marielle filled a teapot from the tap and put it on the stove. "There should be fresh clothes in the wardrobe," she said. "You can take a shower too, if you'd like."

I nodded. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere safe. A friend's." She nodded toward the picture window. "The others are across the courtyard. We'll join them when you're ready."

"The others?"

"Loyalists. People who we can trust."

I wandered over to the window and lifted the edge of the curtain. The window of the second-floor apartment across the way was lit, though the curtains were drawn. "How many?" I asked.

"Eight."

"That's all?"

"Here, yes. Things have gotten bad, and we don't know who we can trust. We can't afford to meet openly." She opened the cupboard and took down two plastic mugs with lids.

"How bad?" I asked.

"We're not sure. It has been difficult to get accurate information. Some of the rank have just gone into hiding-we hope-and they're waiting out this whole affair. The rest-" She didn't finish, and she didn't need to. The rest were ending up like Father Cristobel.

"What are they doing?" I nodded toward the other apartment

Marielle snorted. "Talking, mostly."

I let the curtain drop. "I guess I'll go get cleaned up."

She nodded distractedly, busy spooning loose tea into each of the two mugs.

I didn't think much about the war council going on in the other apartment while I showered. Instead, my mind kept wandering back to what she had said just before getting out of the car.

It hadn't been that long, nor had there been any sort of serious relationship in between. Granted, what Marielle and I had shared during my time in Paris couldn't be considered serious, as the specter of whether or not she was still dating Antoine hovered over us. She had said it was over, but I had always suspected she had neglected to tell Antoine that fact. Or, if she had, neither of them had really believed their separation was permanent. I wasn't Rebound Guy, more the Transient Mysterious Stranger. Not the healthiest of relationships, but compared to the others I'd had, it was pretty cut-and-dried. We liked each other-a lot-and knowing that circumstances were going to doom us at some point, we simply lived in the moment. The arrangement worked until the duel on New Year's Day.

The Chorus had been obsessed with Katarina, and so I had never been fully able to commit my heart to Marielle, and she had a connection to Antoine that remained steadfast throughout our relationship. We were both bound to others, but that hadn't diminished the intensity of our attraction to each other. You can love more than one person-the human heart has such capacity-but you will never be completely resolute in your attention. There will always be the distraction of that other person in your mind.

Even with Reija-and Rose, too-there had been the ghost of Katarina. But now that the Qliphotic shadow was gone, I was no longer as divided as I had been. I could give my full attention to Marielle.

There was only one annoying detail: the spirit of her father floating in my head. Kind of a mood killer. Unless I could figure a way to lock him out.

I gave that some thought while I stood in the shower. It kept me from thinking of other things. Like the slope of her neck, and the way a pearl kept nestling in the hollow of her throat. Like a soap bubble, a tiny moment of time caught in a sphere of magick.

On the morning of the new year, the city slept, exhausted from the midnight revelry of the new aeon. We had survived the millennial change, regardless of how you counted the first year of the next century, and the parties had been flush with the release of all the pent-up panic and apprehension that had unconsciously filled our hearts during the last years of the old world. It was a new world-this shiny twenty-first century, this third millennium-and while everyone slept off the hangover of the old, the new was still too young to be fully aware. We were outside of time for a few hours, between midnight and daybreak, where nothing mattered. Where nothing was true but the breathless promises exchanged during the ebb and flow of our rhythm. For a few hours, wrapped in the midnight cloak of cosmological renewal, we could pretend the past and the future weren't connected. We could close our eyes and forget our fears, thinking such elective blindness did, indeed, wash away the stains of our history. We could forget our petty jealousies and febrile paranoia. For a few hours.

Paris slept, wrapped in heavy blankets against the winter chill, and no one saw the sun's light splash across the white walls of Sacre-C?ur but Marielle and I.

She leaned against the railing of the apartment balcony. Her dark hair was a tangled mass of curls, and she wore an old anorak, threadbare at the left elbow and unraveling along the top of the right shoulder in a way that made it slip down on her arm, revealing the base of her neck. It was too long, coming down to mid-thigh, and her bare legs and feet seemed unaware of the chill air. She held a bottle of soapy water in her left hand and, plastic wand held close to her lips with her right, she blew a stream of bubbles out across the rooftops of the sleeping city.

The clothes weren't hers, nor was the apartment. A friend of Marielle's-a flash of blonde hair in the lights of the club and a husky voice in my ear-had pressed herself up against me shortly after midnight. "She has the key," the friend had said. "Take her away from here." She gave me the passcode to the security system, and thus armed-key and code-we had vanished from the world. Anonymous and lost to everyone but each other. Suspended between midnight and dawn, between the last and the next, we could come together one final time.

I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Marielle blow soap bubbles, my left hand covering the ugly scabs on my right knuckles. There was no disguising the black stain of the bruise forming under my left eye, yet she hadn't said anything about it other than to brush the tender skin once with her lips during our out-of-time excursion.

She dipped the wand into the bottle and glanced back into the shadows of the apartment, her hair falling across her face. "Come outside," she said. "Watch the dawn with me."

Pont Alexandre. At daybreak.

I was already late.

I shook my head. "I have to go," I said.