Return (Matt Turner Series Book 3) (42 page)

Without warning, Matt groaned in her lap. It was barely audible, but she cupped her hand over his mouth to keep him from blurting something out.

“Go fetch the keys off that guard,” the man said. “Isaiah slid him into the closet behind the desk.”

Matt writhed a little and moaned again, louder. Her hand was doing nothing to contain the sound.

His nose!

She pinched it shut with her other hand.

Outside, a woman’s boots padded off, just as a cell phone began ringing a short distance from the door.

One of Matt’s hands gently pried Joss’s fingers off his nose, and he inhaled a slow breath.

“Where are you?” the man outside demanded. “Why exactly are you speaking to me that way? I certainly hope there are others. … Fine, I understand. How many? … Fine. Now, rather than asking whether you’re certain, tell me your
degree
of certainty … What?! … Out of ten, or out of one hundred?” He sighed and was quiet a moment, then slowly headed toward the lobby. “Don’t worry about them. Keep your distance and call me back when they’re on a long enough stretch …”

The man’s voice faded as he left. Silence finally returned to the basement. Joss only hoped the ordeal was truly over.

Matt’s hand returned to delicately remove her palm from his mouth. He whispered, “Let’s wait here a couple minutes, okay?”

She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but she could hear the shape of his mouth in his words. No doubt the rest of his face, too, wore that soothing, zen expression he used to reassure and calm. An involuntary sniffle escaped her, and her ribs quaked with an odd mania of relieved joy mixed with the escaping stress and dread that’d lay pent-up for too long. She clapped her hands against his fuzzy cheeks and quietly giggle-cried, while Matt emitted a fatherly shush.

“
Sh-sh-sh-sh …
”

Alexandria, Egypt – Present day

“Usually I can shut it off entirely,” Matt said as Joss tweezed from the back of his neck another sliver of white ceramic. “And if not, I can generally filter out the noise of a pretty high number of simultaneous imprints. Mind you, these have tended to be contemporary objects—all the parts of a subway seat, the grab bar, pants of the guy on one side, blouse of the woman on the other—not a hundred different ancient artifacts screaming at me at once.”

“And I don’t suppose being gouged and crushed by falling stuff helps much, either.”

“Physical stimulation can be a factor. Good, now there should be a chunk of green glass somewhere. You see anything obvious?”

She squatted to look at his legs again. He peered down at her through their new hotel bathroom’s mirror.

“Mind if I wipe them down again?” She grimaced at the backs of his legs. “I know it stings like hell, but the blood’s still making a mess of things.”

“Not at all. I’m fine.” He dabbed a washcloth on his right forearm where the nastiest wound occurred: a postage-stamp-sized chunk of flesh carved right out, now rotting among the offending shards in the store room.

Joss wrung out her hand towel in the sink and returned to the vanity stool behind him. He inhaled a slow breath as the warm cloth slid down a leg.

“Sorry,” she said for the hundredth time. He dismissed it once more, busying his mind applying antibiotic cream. “You know, you never struck me as the macho,
‘I don’t feel pain’
type.”

He chuckled as she began another wipe. “Neither did I … about myself. My dad was like that. ‘No blood, no pain’ and that sort of thing. There’s something to be said for it, though, in terms of survival. Mind over matter is a real thing. Tell yourself it doesn’t hurt, and at the very least, it lessens it. Macho is more about what other people think, and I don’t believe it does much to convince the central nervous system.”

“So just pretend it doesn’t hurt, huh?” she said with a little smirk. “Does that work for emotions, too?”

Kaleb, Wahbi, Zenobia, Phorus, the members, those dogs … Jon, Rheese, Chuck … Isis … Dad.

“Hey, not to change the subject,” he said to change the subject, “but can you check if Pete sent those stills from the building surveillance yet? He said he’d email your
j-lynn
account.”

She stood up and walked out of the bathroom, half-smug, half-wounded.

It was getting weird with her. And that was dangerous.

He needed to change out of these clothes, too. His T-shirt was practically marinated with her imprints. The compulsion to
“accidentally”
read them was not only distracting, but wrong. Was his ego so deprived after Isis?

Ugh … Isis. She actually did the test.

He drove Isis’s smirking
“told you so”
face from his mind, and lifted his shirt, sticking two fingers into his waistband, and running them along the skin from one side to the other. Nothing in front, however, the same swipe across his lower back yielded the stray shard he sought. It fell past his cheek, dropping from his shorts to the floor. Now, all that remained was from dust that should (hopefully) all wash off in the shower.

“I’m hopping in the shower,” he called, and shut the bathroom door. Remembering another thing, he cracked it open and said, “Let me know if you hear from our friends.”

Joss acknowledged, and he began his ritual scouring process. His cuts weren’t pleased with it.

A numbered and bulleted outline of the next few days expanded in his head. Unlike the previous version, littered with ambiguous gray placeholders, the latest draft retained little haziness. Jivu Absko’s fortuitous arrival at the MERC earlier tendered more than a reprieve from Rostik’s men and Matt’s ridiculous bungle, but also a firmer timeline, and the unexpected gift of insider information. Sadly, Absko must have been wearing gloves, but his phone conversation outside the door yielded invaluable intelligence. Also unfortunate was the fact that Rostik was not among the bodies Absko left behind. Were the men Absko now had following Rostik capable of taking out the Russian mercenary?

From what Matt gathered from the bodies at the MERC, Max and his men were local mercenaries Rostik retained to bolster his numbers. Their orders had been to not kill anyone, but only to capture Matt and Joss. This would have boded well for Leonardo and Josh the cook, but now that Absko was involved, would the guys come out unscathed? Matt had known the pair would be potential casualties, and yet, despite sharing the risks with them (though, perhaps with more optimism than he truly felt at the time), he’d exploited Leo’s apparent adoration for the famous Matthew Turner.

He wondered how Joss was doing after witnessing the bloodbath Absko left behind. Her myriad layers of relief had filtered the scene as they walked out with Pete and the others, but a disturbing sight like that could simmer in a person—pools of shiny red on bright white tile; static astonishment from unseeing eyes; the settled dew of aerosolized blood; carmine splatters, drips and streaks, outlying droplets … a charred carcass curling into itself; a beloved one squealing in agony as their insides spilled—

“Nothing from Pete,” Joss’s voice suddenly came, and from
inside
the bathroom.

“Hey, I’m still showering,” Matt said. He’d forgotten to relock the door. Patra’s trauma amplified his irritation.

“I know, I’m not coming in. I’m talking through a
weeee
gap, and my eyes are closed.”

“Okay, great. I’ll be out soon,” he said, more graciously. Joss’s intrusion had, in fact, come just in time. A welcome distraction.

Was
Joss
a welcome distraction?

“Cool … cool,” she said, “… I also have a text from one of your dudes. They finished passing Abu Qir Bay I guess about twenty minutes ago. The silver SUV is still following them.”

“Perfect. Please remind them to not be looking back or in the mirrors. Just two guys heading off for field work, you know?” Had he sent them to suffer as Kaleb did, but merely to advance personal revenge?

“I actually replied with pretty much that. And I said if the SUV comes up beside them or something, to stay casual and not look at them all scared, but also not keep staring ahead like robots pretending there’s not a big-ass SUV next to them, or worse, to look out the side window and suddenly recoil dramatically like ‘
What the gosh? Where did
you
come from?
’ and then touch their chest all ‘
Phew! Scared me there, strangers! Teehee!
’”

Was this why he needed her around—perpetual sunlight to match encroaching shadows?

“You texted
all
of that to them?” He felt the last bit of imprinted material leave his body.

“Maybe not
all
of that,” she replied. “Anywho, what were you saying before I so rudely interrupted you to go check my email?”

Matt shook his head. “I don’t remember. We’ll wrap it up when I’m done in here.” It wasn’t easy being an aloof dick with her.

“Sounds like a plan … So, I’ve been wondering … Why did you and your girlfriend break up?”

Better than where she’d been trying to go earlier, and did he
really
want her to leave him to his thoughts again? He shut off the water and grabbed a towel from the rack. “She’s a cheater.”

“Oh, man, I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to-”

“No, it’s all right. I’m more than over it. She’s just wired that way. Always has been.”

“Yuck,” Joss said, her voice farther from the door now, no longer having to talk over the shower. “Stumbling upon that must have been pretty gut-wrenching. Especially for you.”

“Yep, though not in an imprint, if that’s what you mean. Isis doesn’t leave any.”

“What? Like, her skin
never
does the thing? Thoughts just don’t … go into stuff?”

He wrapped the towel around his waist, stepped out, and glanced at the door. It was still cracked open, but she’d moved behind it to give him privacy (and to continue talking). “Pretty much, yeah. Hers never have, just like her father, Jon. Something about the Meiers. Her mom imprints, though.”

“Uh, that seems like a
really
big deal,” Joss said, “but I’m guessing by your reaction that it’s sorta common? I’d taken it for granted that everyone just … imprinted on stuff.”

Matt slid on fresh underwear, hung the towel over his neck, and went to the counter. “No, you were right. Everyone else does … that I know of. Just the Meiers, so far.”

Would the baby?

It’d only just then struck him. Clearly there was heredity involved on the Meier end. But what happened when Matt’s blood and Meier blood combined?

Probably nothing.

He went on, “It never occurred to me about Dr. Meier until I got together with Isis after he died. She came to my old house a few years back, said I’d missed the funeral, and gave me a box her dad wanted me to have. I still wasn’t …
at my best
, at that point, and I didn’t really know her that well. I think we’d met a couple times at the museum when she was maybe twelve. But I felt like such a selfish jerk for not just getting my shit together and going to the funeral. After my, um—after Cuba—he was sort of a mentor figure for me.”

“Yeah … I wrote that part of Cam’s script for the shows. It always resonates with the crowds.” Matt held the antibiotic cream in the air. She quickly added, “Please forget I just said that. Jesus H. Mm-hm, go on.”

“Right … so … I invited her in, and we talked for a while about her father. I opened the box and inside was a bunch of different artifacts, among them this wood block, three-sided, with engraved writing on all sides. You picked it up off my shelf back in Jersey.”

“Oh, right, yeah! I remember that. And you snatched it right out of my hands, shoving me along to look at other stuff. I forgot about that.”

Matt stepped into clean cargo shorts and snickered. “I wouldn’t say I
snatched
or
shoved
, but yes, I did return it to the shelf. Anyway, once I was able, I spent quite a bit of time with that block.” He turned on the clippers to trim his beard, raising his voice to talk over the buzz. “It was carved in a city called Tadmur, in the middle of Syria, by a furniture maker named Aviena. Her great-grandfather—supposedly—Prince Kaleb of Kush, had passed down the polished stone version of it, but this original had at some point fallen and broken into multiple pieces. Aviena’s medium was wood, so she decided instead of trying to bond it all back together, she’d reproduce the keystone the best way she knew how.”

“That’s amazing,” Joss said. “So Isis’s dad gave you the first Taria. Crazy. Wait, but that block on your shelf was
way
bigger than a Taria.”

“The head librarian’s keystone was much larger than the others, and Patra hated the weight of it. She traded hers for Kaleb’s early on.”

“So you’ve known the
whole
Alexandria story, and exactly where all the scrolls were since … since three
years
ago?!”

“Not exactly. All of my information before we got hold of Ostrovsky’s pieces was a hundred years more recent, so obviously not from anyone physically present at any of the major events. Though certainly useful, everything was secondhand. Aviena doesn’t … well,
didn’t
even know the names Patra or Philip—only that, besides her ancestor, there’d been two other stewards: a man and a woman, and that the man had been killed around the same time as Kaleb. Aviena’s a second-generation Palmyrene sculptor with no real personal affinity for Alexandria or the Library. Every day she sings the song her mother taught her while turning the keystone over in her hand. She knows there are hidden scrolls, and that every six seasons, she’s supposed to go to Thonis to meet the others. But more as tradition, versus mission. She often skips it.”

Matt rinsed his face and grabbed the can of shaving cream.

Joss was leaning against the doorframe now, watching. “When you were having me jot down all those translated words on the plane … that was all for Markus’s benefit.”

“Not entirely, no. There was definitely new information I wasn’t expecting on the other keystones. But we’ll get back to that. Where was I? Yeah, Aviena … Not much interest in her family history. See, in the decades after Zenobia and Patra, the Library’s shelves were rebuilt and
mostly
restocked. A bunch of scrolls from other libraries were acquired or copied, and scribes had almost immediately set to work recreating what they knew had been lost. In the minds of the stewards’ descendants, they were keeping a rather useless secret about some rather commonplace items. They had no idea that a hundred years later, another attack and a huge fire would reduce all of it to ashes. Plus huge cultural changes swept the region over the centuries. Society stopped caring about keeping a giant library full of information, or at least information about cultures or religions other than their own.”