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fiction: serial fiction
the crown, book one: chapter 8
James floated along next to the wall of bookshelves, as naked as the day he was born, quietly enjoying the freedom and the brisk air up against his body. He brushed his fingers across spines of books, quietly amazed at the trove of data here.
He spun around, taking in the living room with a glance. Every single wall was covered with bookshelves, from floor to vaulted ceiling, most having a metal bar holding the books in place, should some tremor shake them loose. The room, easily several yards across at any given point, was made of what looked like one singular blood-red tile, covered with a large champagne colored rug, fringed at the edges and supporting a large number of comfy leather chairs and plush couches. The room was dominated by a circular coffee table easily the size of an economy car, an obelisk situated at its center and its surface littered with scores of magazines from the past few years. There was a sense of mild disorder about the room, but James thought about his own apartment, not as orderly as he liked, and realized she had a lot to keep track of.
Just then Tonya walked in, wearing only one of his long denim button shirts, sipping a glass of iced tea and poring over the latest issue of Newsweek. He loved the way she looked in his shirts, the full curves of her body sliding along with mocha-shaded grace. She passed right underneath him without noticing, and he drifted up behind her, sliding arms around her waist.
"Mm, hey, baby," she purred, setting the glass down on an endtable nearby. James dug his mouth into the curve of her neck and nuzzled it, eliciting more happy sounds.
"Your book collection is scary," he said appreciatively. "I could stay here for months and not even scratch the surface of my interests."
"You should see the vault fulla books I have out in Sumatra," Tonya smiled, settling herself on a couch. "I had a bad fire once and started keeping only things I had copies of at my houses. Everything really irreplaceable is safe, several hundred feet underground, vacuum packed for freshness."
James chuckled at that, taking a seat next to her. "I was really interested in some of the Moorish treatises on Black superiority, that was a weird juxtaposition to the kinda stuff you see now. Mmm, plush couch feels good when you're nekkid."
Tonya suppressed a giggle. "It was a very different time -- remember, dark skinned people used to have a lot more influence than they do now. There were lotsa crazy ideas at the time, with these pale skinny bastards coming south in droves. 'Demonspawn,' some called 'em, but most of us were really pretty chipper about outsiders, no matter how they looked, and started trading with them and taking 'em in."
James frowned. "In retrospect, that seems like a famously bad idea."
Tonya bit her lip and thought about that for a moment. "From a certain point of view, I guess. I mean, the entire Black Power movement and the modern concepts of Pan-African thought were really responses to a specific set of socio-political and economic forces, things that have been at play for only the last three thousand years, maybe. There were opposite forces at work, and similar sentiments from the other side of the coin."
"Not all along," James countered. "You even said yourself how chummy most people were back then, and ..."
A trilling ring from a cellular phone sounded out and cut James off.
"Mm, that can only be someone calling the gallery," Tonya said. "I have the line forwarded to my cell, but mostly nobody calls since the gallery ... oh, never mind, where's the phone?"
She jumped up and ran towards the kitchen, with James floating right behind her.
"You're gonna forget how to walk if you keep that up," she said, pulling the combination PDA/phone from her purse and flipping it open. "Balance Gallery, can I help you?"
A heavy silence hung over the line, until a deliberate voice said, "Balance Gallery. I can't believe it was that easy to find you, Ma'at Het Heru."
Tonya shrieked and dropped the phone, recoiling from it. James looked alarmedly at her, reaching to pick the cellular off the floor.
"Who is this?" James asked brusquely.
"Ah, you must be the truly lucky recipient of the Crown," the voice said coldly. "Well, we'll get to know one another soon enough, little mortal. My best wishes to Ma'at." The line went dead, and James stared dumbly at it before closing it and setting it down on the marble counter.
He looked around to find out what Tonya thought, but she was no longer standing behind him. He heard sounds from the bedroom, so he floated that way quickly, dodging through the hall until he found her frantically throwing things into a large duffel bag, her braids flying loose from the red scrunchie that held them together.
"Tonya?" James wondered.
"Packing," she said grimly. "We'll swing by your house quickly, then to a storage container I have over by USC. We've gotta get out of southern California in the next few hours, and hope he didn't bring Nigel with him."
"Baby, I live in southern California, I can't just up and ..."
"You're a freelance writer with a laptop," she said, cutting him off as she rushed past to a closet. "You can work anywhere, nobody will know the difference." From inside the closet she added, "Get dressed, we gotta move."
James landed gently on the balls of his feet, and walked into the closet. He found Tonya, pulling down boxes from a high shelf, and took hold of her hands.
"Calm down, Tonya, we've gotta ..."
Tonya reached up and held his chin in her right hand. "I know you're used to being in control, I know you're used to working through things. This is not one of those times. This is the time when we move. There are no choices."
"You're gonna spend the rest of eternity running from this ... that was that Damian Dare guy, wasn't it?"
Tonya nodded slowly, her face tight with tension. "He must have patched things up with Nigel Hawthorne, another immortal we knew, kind of a bloodhound for energy. When we fell in love, Nigel must have noticed it happening, and now we have to go."
James took hold of her hands again, stared evenly at her and asked, "Tonya, do you love me?"
Tonya melted into his eyes, his gaze so sure, so even. "You know I do. I love you so much, even after believing it was impossible."
"If you love me, you understand some things about me," James said. "I can't run. I got friends here, I got commitments. Plus I'm not afraid -- I want to stay alive as long as I can, and spend that time with you, but I'm willing to leave this world if it comes to it, in order to protect you. If being me means you're gonna leave me alone, I'm gonna hurt for a long time, but that's how it has to be. Even if it means losing everything."
Tonya dropped her head and dived into his arms, crying.
"You're the best thing that ever happened to anybody, let alone me, but I'm an LA brother. I can't go off like I'm some punk. I even think that sounds stupid, but that's the way it is."
"I know," Tonya sobbed into his chest. "I knew it when I fell in love with you. You're too stubborn to be smart."
James smiled and rested his chin on the crown of her head. "Are you gonna leave?"
Tonya looked up, her eyes red and puffy. "No," she said flatly. "I can't leave you. We just have to ... we just have to be careful. I'll come up with another way. I'll need to stay at your place ..."
"No problem!" James said excitedly. "You already have stuff there, and ..."
Tonya kissed him, slowly, gently, their lips brushing across one another like silk on satin in a slow dance to unheard songs. "I need to sit down and think ... and make some calls. We do have to leave here, today, seriously."
James nodded. "I'll get dressed, let you get started. We have to come out of the closet first."
"Come out?"
"Didn't you know?" James grinned with a lick of his lips. "I'm a lesbian!"
Tonya pushed him back, chuckling, out of the closet door.
* * *
Dare set the phone down atop the phone book with a satisfied grin on his face. He turned to his right, noting the mousy bespectacled brunette sitting to his left, a stenographer's pad resting on her crossed legs, her smart business suit looking none the worse for wear after being rushed to the airport.
"Doreen," Dare said lazily, as her pen shot up, ready to write, "go into the database and look up the name of that woman in the California Association of REALTORS. Get her started on finding out who owns Balance Gallery in San Pedro, and find out who owns that. There's a note in the record about why she should beckon to my call, so feel free to remind her of that."
Doreen scribbled furiously.
"If my experience holds up, the gallery should be owned by a person who will be impossible to find, but that person should have a corporate relationship listed. That company, again, if patterns hold, should be held in trust for some extranational interest. If so, then call Inspector Broussard at Interpol. If not, if she's finally gotten sloppy, it should have some local information, and we'll wanna find all southern California holdings under that name. Use all information gathering tools at your disposal. I want a list of possible locations by the time we touch down."
Doreen nodded, looking up at him, over her glasses, for instructions.
"You may go now," he said smoothly, reaching for a half-drained glass of cognac just past the phone book.
Doreen bolted out of her seat and back towards the rear of the plane, where a bank of desktop computers waited to connect her to the world below. Damian watched her go, and absently wondered how long it would be until he decided to find something horrible to do to her.
He turned to look at the wide, flat plasma monitor, hooked up for an external view of the plane, and remarked at the view as it went by.
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