Page 67 of Curse of Immortality
Damon laughed with disgust in his voice “I’m not bloody marrying an Earthen.”
Pushing his chair back, Charles calmly stood up and spoke with a hard edge. “You will if I ask you to.”
Scrunching his face up, Damon looked straight at Charles. “Are you asking me to marry Maeve’s sister?”
Keeping his Fader in suspense, Charles pretended to think about it. “Not at this point. I’m asking you to get her to tell you everything about Orenda and whom Zosia chooses for the quest. Get close to her and earn her trust. After watching her for all this time, you must have learned something valuable about her that you can use to seduce her.” Damon groaned. “She’s nothing like the women I normally interact with.”
“You mean, she’s not a whore?” Thomas asked and grinned at his joke.
With a sideways glance at his friends, Damon muttered, “At least I don’t seduce the virgin daughters of my business partners. Your reputation as a rake is well deserved. My women are well taken care of and when we grow apart, I always make sure they lack for nothing for the rest of their lives.”
Thomas threw up his hands. “When did you grow tired of the chase? I don’t always seduce virgins. I enjoy an experienced lover as much as the next man.”
Charles cut through the chatter. “Find Althea and give me a report once you have useful information to share.”
Popping one last olive in his mouth, Damon pushed his chair back and rose from the table as well. “I had better see if she’s still in London.” He walked over and opened a window. “Finding her has been the tricky part lately.”
From his pocket, Charles pulled out an old-looking compass. “I have a suspicion that Orenda isn’t anywhere in this world. If humans truly aren’t allowed to enter then Zosia must have created a different dimension somehow. That would explain why Althea shows up in so many different places within a short time span. I believe she travels through those portals she told Maeve about.”
“But if humans can’t pass through those portals, then we Faders might not be able to either,” Damon pondered.
Charles nodded in agreement. “That’s what I need you to find out. This will help you move from one place to the other fast.”
“You’re giving me a compass?”
“It has the power to transport you any place you want to go. That way it will be easier to track her.”
Damon reached for the object but Charles didn’t let go at first. In a stern voice, he warned. “Don’t lose it.”
With a bit of hesitation, Damon took the compass and asked, “How does it work?”
“You hold it and think of the place you want to go. Once you’re locked in on the thought, squeeze it twice and it will take you there.”
“Sounds simple enough.” Stuffing the compass in his pocket Damon looked at Thomas. “I’ll see you later.”
“Let me help you find her. London is a big place,” Thomas said and without another word, he shifted into a raven and flew out the window.
Exchanging a last glance with Charles, Damon swallowed his bad feelings about the assignment, shifted into his favorite of all forms, a black eagle, and flew out to hunt down Althea.
Chapter 26
The Eagle and His Prey
After Althea’s unpleasant confrontation with Maeve, her first instinct had been to hurry back to Orenda to lick her wounds. As she entered a quiet alley where a tree had dropped all its leaves, she lifted her hand to create a portal but was interrupted when a bird came and told her of a child in great pain. With a sigh, she remembered Annabel’s words that the best way to forget your problems was to help someone else.
Following the bird, Althea was led through the streets to a house in a middle-class neighborhood. She took a deep breath before knocking on the door. The birds always seemed to know who was open to a visit from a healer and so it didn’t surprise Althea when the mother who stood in the doorway began to cry. “I prayed for someone to help my child and not an hour later, you arrive on my doorstep. You must be an angel.”
Althea shook her head. “I’m afraid not. But if you show me to your daughter, I’ll do my best to ease her pain.”
Two hours later Althea walked out of the house feeling pleased with herself. The girl had been burning up from fever, but with Althea’s help, she stabilized her temperature and managed to help her eat. The pain she had experienced was eased and with a few more visits from Althea over the next days, the child would be up and running by end of the week.
It was late fall and there were enough leaves, sticks, and rocks on the ground to create a portal back to Orenda, but with too many people around she preferred to find a quiet place. It wasn’t that the humans would see the portal, but when she walked through to Orenda, they would see Althea disappear into thin air. Most who noticed Althea enough to see how she would disappear would think their mind was playing tricks on them and carry on with their day, but being a kind and considerate healer, she was aware that for some people an experience like that could cause them to potentially get a heart attack from distress and confusion and she didn’t want that on her conscience. Luckily, she’d seen a park not far away and headed in that direction.
Walking down the crowded streets of London, where people wore tall hats and heavy gowns, Althea struggled to understand what it was about humans that lured Maeve into wanting their lifestyle.
As a healer, Althea had met many humans throughout the decades, and the more she learned about them, the more she pitied them. They lived in a world filled with rules they made themselves, yet those rules benefited no one. Hatred, suspicion, and fear of others ruled the world they lived in, which placed everyone in tight boxes that few could stay within.
It all felt like a play-pretend to Althea – their fashions and their strange social status which depended on gender, pure luck, and family connections. Those irrelevant constructs of society were defining things in the human world. It made Althea long all the more to return to Orenda, a place where people could be exactly who they were without judgment.
