Blood Legacy: The Story of Ryan (15 page)

Susan stepped out onto the entranceway to a mansion. Light streamed from every window into the night beyond. She stood at the base of the stairway, staring upward in astonishment. She had been to many opulent houses, but this was a castle.

The man took her elbow and began guiding her up the stairs. Normally she would not stand for such a patronizing gesture, but she was overwhelmed at her surroundings and was actually glad for the guidance.

Double doors whispered outward and she was led through the entranceway into a luxurious foyer. The furnishings were elegant, but simple as well. Servants kept their eyes downcast as she passed. If they were curious, they did not show it.

Susan was led through another set of double doors into what appeared to be a small version of the Smithsonian library. A large fire burned in a huge marble fireplace set in the wall. The golden-haired woman sat behind a desk, reading the Wall Street Journal. She did not look up at Susan’s approach.

The man stopped several feet from the desk and Susan stopped as well. He did not speak, and Susan shifted uncomfortably. The woman didn’t appear to notice their entrance, and did not acknowledge their presence in any way. Susan quickly became impatient and took a step forward.

In a flash, the elder man was in front of her, blocking her path. Susan was startled by the quickness of his movement and retreated the step she had taken forward. He still did not speak, merely looked down at her with disapproval.

“Let her pass, Edward.”

The voice was sardonic, almost resigned. After an imperceptible hesitation, Edward stepped out of Susan’s way. He moved some distance away, maintaining his vigil.

The woman finally looked up. For the first time, Susan noticed the strange color of her eyes, a combination of gray, blue and green. They seemed to shift hues with the flickering firelight. Her gaze was mesmerizing and her words, although polite, were a decree. “Won’t you have a seat, Dr. Ryerson?”

Susan moved numbly to the seat the woman indicated. Strangely, her anger and urgency disappeared at the sound of the woman’s voice. Susan noted the undefinable quality she had noted before, the depth that belied her youth.

“It seems you have me at a disadvantage,” Susan said, referring to the fact that the woman knew her name.

“Yes,” the woman interrupted smoothly, “I do.”

Susan flushed at the slightly mocking tone in the woman’s voice. She had come here with the intent of demanding answers. Yet now all she could do was sit and stare at the young woman who stared back at her with an unblinking gaze.

“Do you have a name?” Susan finally asked, unable to completely disguise her sarcasm.

The sarcasm did not escape the woman, nor did it offend her. There was a devilish glint in her eye when she replied. “Yes, I have a name.”

She turned in her chair, her unblinking gaze resting on Edward for a moment, then turned back to Susan. “My name is Rhian.”

Susan was not certain she had heard the name right. It had a slightly different inflection than she had heard before. Evidently, the woman picked up on Susan’s confusion and elaborated. “An acceptable equivalent would be ‘Ryan.’ Now what can I do for you this evening?”

The events of the last few days came flooding back to Susan and she felt her anger stir again. “You could start with an explanation. My son is in the hospital.”

Ryan nodded. “I am well aware of the condition of your son. I warned you that you were in danger.”

Susan felt her anger flare. “I think you owe me more than a warning. I want some answers. Who the hell are you? Why did that man come after me? And why did you kill him? Couldn’t you have just stopped him? Turned him over to the police?”

Ryan looked at her with an expression that bordered on exasperation, as if what she was suggesting was incredibly naive. Susan was just beginning to vent, though, and now the questions and accusations came pouring out.

“You show up in my lab a corpse and I watch you come back to life, only to have you smash your way out of the hospital. You show up three months later, break into my house, leave some obscure warning, then disappear again. Three days after that, some madman attacks me, and you pop up out of nowhere and break his neck. In the meantime, my son is in the wrong place at the wrong time and nearly gets his head cracked open.”

Susan finished her tirade, catching her breath. Her chest heaved with the emotion of her words. She felt tears sting her eyes as Ryan gazed at her, expressionless. The golden-haired woman spoke at long last.

“I am sorry about your son.”

Susan lashed out at her. “Well, wonderful. I want you to be more than sorry. I want some answers. Who are you?”

The words hung between them for a long moment. Susan did not think it was a question requiring so much thought.

Ryan pushed back from the desk and leaned back in her chair, crossing her long legs in front of her. She folded her hands, her elbows on the armrests of the chair. She gazed at Susan Ryerson in the flickering light.

“Do you know how old I am, Dr. Ryerson?

Susan didn’t see how the question was relevant. “No, I don’t,” she said impatiently, “I would think late 20’s, maybe early 30’s.”

The woman’s eyes shifted to Edward who was standing in the shadows. Whatever unspoken advice he transmitted to her, she ignored. “Late 20’s, early 30’s,” she repeated. She picked up the glass of red wine from her desk, swirling the contents. “I don’t have a record of my birth,” she said, “but as near as I can tell, I should be reaching a century mark sometime soon.”

The woman’s words were conversational, as if she were discussing something as mundane as the weather. Susan wasn’t certain she had heard her correctly.

“Are you telling me you’re almost a hundred years old?”

Ryan shook her head, her gaze on Susan. “No,” she said, “almost seven hundred.”

Susan caught her breath. Obviously what the woman was suggesting was impossible. Extraordinary anatomy or not, she could not possibly be that old. Even as Susan mentally denied the possibility, though, her own words came back to her: longevity, immunity, strength…

It seemed as if the woman could read her mind. “Don’t you believe your own research, Dr. Ryerson? Can you explain any of your findings? What did you say? ‘The patient appears to be suffering from some type of genetic abnormality, or perhaps a state of advanced pathology. The heart is enlarged to nearly three times normal size. The lungs are shrunken, as are the liver and the pancreas…’”

Susan was stunned. The woman was repeating word-for-word what she had documented on her computer. “How did you get access to my records?”

Ryan shook her head. “I didn’t need to, Dr. Ryerson. I overheard you.”

Susan shook her head, still feeling numb. “You couldn’t have. You were unconscious, and out of hearing range.”

Ryan’s reply was softly spoken. “Having not actually tested my hearing range, I would think that’s a rather premature statement.”

Susan was taken aback at the gentle reproof.

“You see, that’s a problem,” Ryan said, continuing her mild rebuke. “Your scientific method analyzes everything, explains nothing. It is blind to everything outside itself. You’re a product of your time. You’ve been taught to distrust everything you cannot measure with your senses. Which amazes me,” she added as an afterthought, “because humans have notoriously poor senses.”

“What do you mean ‘humans’?” Susan said with skepticism, “Are you saying you’re not human?”

Ryan gazed at her. “I would not think so, noting the very fundamental differences between myself and human beings. I think I was once human, but that was a very long time ago.”

“Seven hundred years ago?” Susan asked, unable to hide her sarcasm.

Ryan just smiled, amused at the sarcasm. “Seven hundred years ago,” she replied.

“Then what are you, if you’re not human?”

Ironically, this gave Ryan pause. She turned to stare into the fire. “I don’t have a name to describe my Kind, because I speak with the language of humans. And humans have no name for my Kind, any more than people who live in a black and white world would have names for colors.”

“What year were you born?”

Ryan laughed, aware of Susan’s attempt to trap her. “Again, that shows me your inability to step outside your time. Only in this century has time been divided into such discrete little quantities.” She continued to gaze into the fire. “As if the ebb and flow of life were so constrained.” She turned to Susan, raising an eyebrow. “I read history books and they give the illusion that the human race has always measured itself with calendars and clocks and the dates of important events. When I was a child, we didn’t even know of such things.”

Susan did not try to hide her incredulity. “So how do you know it’s almost seven hundred years?”

Ryan had a gleam in her eye; she saw through the skepticism to the beginnings of genuine interest. “I know I was born in the first part of the 14th century, my best guess would be around 1325, if your history books are even close to being correct.”

“Why 1325?”

“When I was 16 seasons,” Ryan paused, correcting herself, “I mean 16 years old, I fought for Edward, the Black Prince.”

Susan thought furiously, trying to remember her history. She would shatter this illusion yet. “Would that have been the Hundred Years War?”

Ryan looked at her mockingly. “Well, yes, I guess, but it was not called the Hundred Years War until later because, when it started, no one knew it was going to last a hundred years.”

Susan stopped, startled. She hadn’t thought of that. Ryan continued her rumination.

“Actually, it lasted exactly two for me, at which time I ran away from service to return to my family.”

Susan thought she had her now. “How could you be allowed to fight in the 14th century as a woman?”

Ryan shook her head. “I couldn’t. Women were little more than chattel at the time I was born, which is why to this day I sometimes have difficulty respecting them.”

Susan shook her head. “I examined you, remember? I know you’re female.”

Ryan’s gaze settled on Susan. Susan felt warmth gather at the back of her neck and realized she was blushing. Ryan’s words were soft, amused. “Yes, I am well aware of your examination, Dr. Ryerson.”  The words hung in the air, and then Ryan raised her voice once more. “Technically, I was born a female. But until I was 19 seas—, years old, I was raised as a man. In fact, for the first 400 years of my life, I lived as a man.”

Susan’s disbelief was evident. “Why?”

Ryan laughed. “You have to remember, Dr. Ryerson, things were not as you think they were. I would have been at a tremendous disadvantage had I been raised female, and perhaps would not have survived. As a male I was given many privileges and freedoms that would have been questioned were I female.”

For the first time, Ryan turned her attention fully to Susan

“I’ve watched your moving pictures, your films, and I’ve seen the portrayals of both my time and of other times, of this world, and of other worlds. And I can tell you, in every portrayal I’ve seen, even the wildest fantasy or science fiction, I have never seen a world more alien than the one from which I came.”

This statement silenced Susan, simply because it had the profound ring of truth.

Ryan stood, moving to the fireplace. “You have to remember that when I was born, the only light in the world was fire.” She turned back to Susan. “There was no running water, no bathroom facilities, no supermarkets. Food had to be grown or killed.” Ryan gestured to a picture of a wolf that sat on her desk “There were no photographs, no paintings for the common man, no drawings, no likenesses of any kind.” She pointed to the shelves and shelves of books. “There were no books, no written communication of any kind. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because we were profoundly ignorant. No one could read or write other than the clergy and whatever they said was taken at face value.” Ryan glanced down at the Wall Street Journal. “Higher math was unknown because few people could even count; they had no need to. Life was simple and harsh.”

Ryan returned to her chair, reclining once more. “A horse was the most rapid transportation known to man, and if a person traveled more than a 100 miles from their place of birth, they might as well have seen the whole world.” She shook her head. “No one knew anything of political events, so the myths you read in history books about the peasants rising up to fight for some noble cause are just that: myths. We were profoundly ignorant about everything, and the 20th century forgets that when they try to imagine what it was like.”