Requiem (16)
One can't say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here.
That is why the furnishings seem so heavy.
Emily jolted at the spit of a log shifting in the fireplace grate, its shrill pop sounding more like a gunshot than the groan of old wood settling in. An eye or two looked up at her abrupt, reactive shake, then descended once again to the meal without remark. She reached for her fork reluctantly and released a mute, lamenting sigh. That's it, twenty minutes without a pulse. The party was over. Time of death: 8:32 PM. Her first foray into formal entertaining could now be declared a disaster. So unfair. It was so unfair. And it wasn't even her fault.
Was it a mistake to have asked them here? She still couldn't be sure. She looked to Nikolas for guidance in this, but from the time he'd ushered his brother out the door and escorted him down to the launch his words had been clipped, his features cold and closed to inquiry of any kind. She couldn't tell if he was angry or simply steeling himself for the hours ahead; this meal, this night, what tomorrow might bring. That was his third drink though, three-quarters gone and neat, the addition of ice abandoned with his diplomatic manner before they'd taken their seats. No word had been spoken to relieve the sound of silverware clinking to plates, the whisk of a roll basket passing, the rustle of a napkin rising to a face. Minutes strained and stretched beneath the silence, waiting for him to snap.
"I want you to leave," Nikolas pronounced, his attention fixed on spearing his beef, then soaking its grain in au jus. "Finish your dinner and take the launch. Pack your bags and go right back to wherever it is you came from. There's nothing for you here, trust me." The meat found his tongue before his gaze lifted to the man he addressed.
"I will, of course, respect your wishes," Maxim advanced gravely. "What's left of my assignment could be completed without your involvement. I can promise you wouldn't see me again."
His host displayed a wry scowl. "But that's not the same as leaving, is it?"
"No. No, it is not." Lady Cardiff eased back into her chair and observed this prince over the canted rim of her water glass. "You wanted to test him and you did. You have your answers. Demand we leave this house and we'll go. But you do not own us, Nikolas, as inconvenient as that may be."
"And what's your damage here?" he asked, warming to the byplay. "You hide behind a title and a lovely dress, but we both know you're not above the act of holding a knife to my brother's neck. Beyond the call of a mere companion, don't you think?"
"Does he know?" she countered obliquely, parrying his contention with one of her own. "That brother of yours, is he aware of the way you use him? That temperament of his, both shield and lance in the right man's hand. Reminiscent of the manner in which your uncle maneuvered his father. What is it they say about apples not falling so very far from their trees?"
"I am not my uncle," he disputed darkly, a miasmic distaste underpinning his tone.
"No, Nikolas, you are not."
An allowance that should have calmed him down, his wife thought, yet somehow seemed only to further infuriate him. Like a poke to a bear, and she recognized the rage bubbling to his surface; the malevolence flickering in the flat black stare of his eye. "So tell us, Lady Cardiff," she inquired, attempting to defuse the situation. "Where are you from? Your title sounds British, but Maxim said neither one of you came from England."
"My father was British, my mother Bedouin. I was raised in Saudi Arabia."
"And yet you speak Russian," Nikolas contested, pouncing on this truth as if it were a crime he could hold against her.
"The Soviet states lie at our doorstep," she replied matter-of-factly. "Surely a man of your education has had the opportunity to examine a globe?"
Emily looked to Maxim in a desperate bid for help, which he was gracious enough to provide. "Lord Cardiff was in the diplomatic corps. Esme found the field interesting and chose her studies accordingly. She currently serves as cultural liaison to the Saudi princes and their concerns in St. Petersburg."
"And you, Maxim?" his hostess urged, anxious to move the conversation to a less combative level. "You work in St. Petersburg, too?" He nodded but she needed more than that, more words, more distance to discourage the antipathy she sensed smoldering just beneath her husband's skin. "What do you do?"
"I'm in training as an archivist at the National Library of Russia," he imparted, casting an indifferent glance to his host. "It affords me the unique opportunity to study our family's past."
Nikolas snorted in amusement and fell once again to carving up his meat. "Do they give you a set of boots for that? It's got to be a prerequisite to go slogging through all the blood."
"Oh, I think it sounds fascinating!" Emily enthused, delighted to have landed on a subject she had some interest in. "How far back have you gone? Nikolas says he's descended from the first Grand Prince of Kiev. Is it true?"
Maxim drew back from the table and touched his napkin to his lips. "Well, as with most genealogical attestations, that depends upon whom you ask," he disclosed, adopting a politely tutorial tone. "Two Vladimirs governed the early Kievan alliance, both princes and predominant men who descended directly from the legendary figure Riurik - a man more myth than mortal who founded Kiev's premiere ruling dynasty. The first, known only as Vladimir, reigned from 978 to 1015 and brought the Orthodox religion to his realm. The Russian soul insists this Vladimir was the first true prince of Rus. The second man, Vladimir Monomakh - named for the Byzantine crown he was accorded - fell just outside the line of succession, but was chosen by the people for his prowess as a warrior. Fulfilling what one might perceive to be his battle mandate, he immediately set out to defeat the much-reviled Kipchak kaganate who had, for many years, been a plague upon his nation and then went on to rule Kievan Rus from 1113 to 1125. Russian pride demands this second Vladimir be considered the first true Grand Prince. To which do the Cassadines attach themselves? Again, that depends on which Cassadine you ask. A case can be made for descent from either one. And has."
Emily, refusing to be stuck in the murk of such a distant and disturbingly indeterminate past, flew forward several hundred years to a story she was more familiar with. "And what about the pirates? Were there many of them?"
"Vikings, you mean?" ventured Maxim, noting the halt of his host's fork halfway between his plate and his mouth. "The Varangian incursion pre-dated Kievan Rus. An ancient event. I'm afraid I can offer only theory there."
"No, no," Emily dismissed. "Not them. The Cassadine pirates. This would have been around, oh, the seventeen hundreds?" She looked to Nikolas for confirmation but found him busy downing the last of his drink in what she thought was manifest disinterest.
"I'm sorry," her guest confessed, mystified by the question. "We had our share of Cossacks who, on occasion, raided the ships of the Caspian. This would be during the sixteen hundreds. Such raids were rare though, and confined to neighboring seas and tributary rivers. They were more plunderers than pirates in the sense that they lived on land, not ships." He discerned her disappointment and quickly added, "If you know a story I'd be most intrigued to hear it. The tale of a Cassadine pirate would be a first for me."
"There wouldn't be a record of it, would there?" Nikolas reflected, rising from his silence to respond. "A man becomes a pirate to escape the bondage of his everyday life. I imagine the minute he sets sail he falls off the face of the earth as far as historians are concerned."
"I imagine he does," Maxim allowed dubiously. "You know of one, then? A Cassadine pirate?"
"Oh, yes!" his hostess proclaimed, tickled to find herself possessed of knowledge this expert didn't have and so obviously hungered after. Her shoulders straightened proudly as she pitched her voice to mimic his dry, instructive tone. "He called himself Blackthorn. An alias, of course. His real name was Prince Nikolai."
"How ironic," remarked Lady Cardiff, setting down her water glass and leaning forward with a sparkle in her eye.
"Isn't it? We thought so, too!" Emily's hand reached across the table to finger her husband's sleeve, but that arm had risen to signal the maid for a refill of his drink. "We think his family had fallen on hard times and he was forced into piracy to keep himself solvent. Anyway, one day he was walking through a park when he came across a lady of distinction who was being molested by bandits. He rescued her and they felt an immediate attraction. They began to meet in a tavern after dark where they danced and flirted and fell in love. But there was an obstacle in their path, her arranged marriage to a Spanish nobleman named Don Rego. They tried to part and do what was right, but their love wouldn't be denied. So Blackthorn devised a plan. She was scheduled to sail to her groom on a ship called the Courage whose hold was filled with her dowry; a fortune in jewels and treasure. Blackthorn's ship would intercept the Courage and carry off the fortune and his lady love. But something went wrong and the ship sank here in the Port Charles harbor. The lovers managed to make their way to Spoon Island where they hid most of the treasure in a cave. We found that cave a year ago and the treasure was still there, behind two hearts carved into the stone of a secret door. I think it's safe to say Blackthorn and his lady, Constance Quartermaine, lived happily ever after."
Lady Cardiff appeared appropriately astonished at the revelation of the woman's name. Her companion, on the other hand, seemed to be struggling to absorb what he'd just been told. Emily caught sight of this and happily deigned to erase his concerns. "Blackthorn recorded the story in his journal. In fact, it was the journal that led us to the treasure. We still have it. Would you like to see?"
"I don't think that will be necessary," her husband asserted, casting a stern, reproving glare in the direction of his guest. "I'm sure Maximillian will take you at your word."
"It wouldn't occur to me to do otherwise," Maxim maintained. "But I'm left with a question here. How is it you know this Blackthorn was a Cassadine?"
"We don't," his host discharged. "It's simply one of Emily's theories."
"Oh, it's so much more than a theory," she disputed on a chastising glance. "It's the tattoo. The Cassadine tattoo. The same tattoo that circles his bicep is inscribed in Blackthorn's journal. There's a connection there. There has to be. And Nikolas said that his uncle told him all Cassadine princes get that same tattoo when they reach their twentieth birthdays. Blackthorn had to be a Cassadine. There's no other explanation."
Lady Cardiff's laugh, as exquisite as it was unexpected, startled the table into silence. All eyes rose to question its cause save those of her companion, who seemed less shocked than shamed by her response. "Esme," he scolded, taking her to task.
"But a tattoo, Zimi. A Cassadine tattoo," she trilled, unwilling to release her hold on the delight of this idea.
"You would mock our rituals, then?" he admonished, his features growing grim.
"Very well, very well," she submitted, surrendering her amusement in the face of his disdain. "I cannot claim to know every rite and arcane act you practice. But the inking of the skin like a slave or a sailor or the hennaed bride of a Maharaja king? You must admit it taxes the very fabric of comprehension."
"Cassadine custom is often incomprehensible to the outsider," he informed her, turning to seek an affirmation from his host. "Wouldn't you agree?"
"To the insider as well, on occasion," Nikolas permitted cryptically, studying the face of his guest with an unreadable intent. "Mrs. Landsbury," he called, his eyes still locked stubbornly on Maxim. He seemed to sense the moment she arrived and addressed her briskly. "We'll be putting off dessert for the time being. I've decided to take my cousin on a tour of the grounds. Ladies?" he acknowledged, excusing himself from the table. "Maximillian, if you would follow me?"
His bewildered wife pulled the napkin from her lap and set it on the table, her gaze trailing the men as they exited the room. "It's awfully dark to take a tour."
"I wonder, Mrs. Cassadine," Esme mused as her companion disappeared from view. "Have you ever given thought to fencing that cliff?"
The pace tested him. Not so much the single-minded stride from the mansion, or the beeline through the gardens, or even the tromp to the outlying stables but their dogged trek past that; beyond what was considered the house of house-and-grounds and then the grounds of house-and-grounds, all the way down to the unpaved, untamed wilds of the island's no man's land. Well, no man's land but his, apparently.
This loamy soil, damp with the dew of an evening mist, sponged beneath his feet to sink in one place, slide in the next, and begged a breathless curse. Couldn't catch your footing to a rhythm or your balance on command, and the determined drive of his unrelenting host lent the whole of the exercise the suspiciously-sadistic quality of a forced march. Bad enough the trough and rise of the barely-beaten path where the moonlight, as much as there was of it, tucked and trimmed to the bulges, leaving its fallow bits dark and scattered like a peppering of treacherous voids - when the prince turned off to stalk through the trees it was all he could do to stifle a groan and locate the means to keep up. Twigs snapped and skittered as they trudged through a glen, fat-leafed branches catching at his hair, the scoured bark of ghosted oaks snagging at his sleeves - and it occurred to him more than once to stop, to halt in his fierce but flagging tracks, to hold right here or there or anywhere close and demand this Cassadine make his choice. Give me death or an explanation. I will go no further than this. But he did go further, he followed on and on; down the scrabbled slopes and up the gutted grades 'til he was sure this spit of land would run out and they'd finally reach the water. It surprised him more than he thought possible to find his cousin slowing and the harbor nowhere in sight.
They came to their stop in a shadowed glade, just the pocket of a plain in this meandering amble of a forest, lined with a carpet of sandy dirt that stretched all the way to the rockface. Half a cliff it was, and he noted with a mild, dignified relief they were standing at its base. No tossing tonight in a show of that manic insanity his grandmother had unwittingly unleashed…although when the man slipped off his coat and began to roll up a sleeve, he did suspect another kind of struggle was about to take place.
"Can you see it?" Nikolas asked, thrusting his arm into the light spilling from the waning yellowed moon.
Maxim approached and spied the dark stain on his skin; the thick, undulating circlet of ink that banded his muscular bicep; his infamous Cassadine tattoo. He nodded and the prince stepped apart, his fingers reaching for the vines that covered the stone behind him. He stripped the tendriled shoots away to reveal a crude carving; old, gold and etched into the rock; a twin to the design that now graced his arm.
"I found this when I was sixteen. I liked it. I had it copied and inked into my skin, a mark my uncle would have hated and insisted I remove. Which is why I waited until he left for Milan to do it." He thumbed the fold of his sleeve, drawing it back down the length of his arm. "Did Blackthorn scratch that symbol in the cliff? It's possible, I guess. Was he a Cassadine? Certainly not. My wife was recovering from cancer. She had a romantic fantasy. I let her keep it."
He buttoned the cuff at his wrist and punched a fist into his jacket, wrestling the coat around his waist to catch its other sleeve. "There is no ritual Cassadine tattoo, something I'm sure you're aware of, and I won't fall prey to owing you for a lie I didn't ask you to tell. I have no problem sharing these facts with my wife. If it costs her a fantasy, so be it. Better that than in debt to a man whose motives are, at best, obscure."
And there was his father's bootprint, hard and artful, dancing its jig through this prince's refrain. All those years of training, it seemed, had not gone amiss. "It was never my intent to maneuver you into a state of obligation. Whatever stories you tell your wife or allow her to believe are no concern of mine. I won't argue their merits, your reasoning or her level of credulity. Those are private matters, and a province I have no right or desire to transgress. As for the obscurity of my motives," Maxim imparted with the hint of a grin, "we've only just met. I believe I've revealed several truths tonight that you were, to this juncture, unaware of. Given time, I'm certain I'll go on to reveal a good many more. The question here, Nikolai Stavrosovich, is whether or not you plan to do the same. At the moment I think the answer is not."
An old snare, that one, yet it had always caught his father's foot. The art of information exchange. How much could you take? How little could you give? The lure of a fortune in knowledge for the price of half a dozen inconsequent scraps. You could bankrupt a man with a phrase or an oath or a logic so hollow it would crumble to dust on the next stiff wind. Stefan Cassadine had adored this game, unable to resist its strategic allure. Had he passed that wickedly addictive pleasure down to his nephew in the same way he'd passed it down to his son? In the reflective silence that followed, as a breeze rustled through the overhanging trees and the moon dipped an additional degree in its arc toward the horizon, Maxim suspected his cousin was actually weighing the worth of rolling the dice.
"Short or long?"
"I'm sorry?"
"The odds," Nikolas pronounced, his voice bending to break the words like billiard balls between them. "Are they short or long? Two-to-one? Three-to-one? Ten-to-one? The family's betting. The council's laid the odds. What are they? What are the odds my uncle is still alive?"
The game had begun.
Requiem (17)
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
She didn't know what had gotten into him. What could he have been thinking to abandon her this way? What was she supposed to do? To say? How did he expect her to fill up the seconds, the minutes or, heaven help them if it turned out to be, the hours until he returned?
Unsure about remaining at the table, she adjourned the meal to escort her doubts into the living room. Her arm swept out gracefully, brooming her bright smile ahead, thinking no one would look past its resplendence to the stricken shape of her eye. It was hard to hold, this gracious face; as hard to manage its expression as it was her obligation to speak, to entertain, to amuse. He'd left her with nothing but fragments here, nothing to work with but a title and a wit and a subtle animosity that warned her to proceed with care. They sat and she ordered tea with authority, the back of her mind consumed by the search for a subject of conversation; a single, introductory question.
Lady Cardiff, suffering this uncertainty like a dull itch beneath her skin, rode to the rescue to ask, "What prompted you to keep the house? It seems very large for a family of two."
"Oh, it is. It is," Emily admitted in relief. "Fifty-three rooms, can you imagine? We've closed off the East Wing, though. And his uncle's rooms. It's easier on the staff. As for keeping it, well, this is my husband's home. He deserves this house. It shouldn't be lost just because his family fleeced the Estate."
"I've heard his grandmother has very expensive tastes," her guest allowed.
"She's insane. Everybody knows it. And Stefan did his share of damage, too. He left us in debt to gangsters when he died. Then Alcazar sold the note to Faith Roscoe and things just went from bad to worse. Wyndemere was put on the market. Nikolas tried to pretend it didn't bother him, but I could see it did. He was losing everything that mattered to him. I couldn't have that, so I bought the house and gave it back to him as a gift."
"And was he pleased?"
"Yes," she confessed, surrendering a small, comforting sigh as she fingered the diamond on her hand.
"That surprises me."
Emily blinked on this remark, disturbed and questing for an explanation - which Esme frankly supplied. "If I'm not mistaken, Nikolas had gone to great pains over the years to strip himself of everything bearing the stamp of the Cassadine. He had no interest in ruling this family; no desire to encumber himself with its myriad duties and obligations. His uncle dies, the wealth is gone, he is very nearly free. You paint it as a failure but I have to wonder if it wasn't, when all is said and done, the consummate cresting of his success."
Emily's forehead furrowed, her head shaking on the claim. "I don't consider homelessness a mark of success."
"Ah, but Wyndemerelessness. I can't help but think that idea held its share of appeal. No matter," she professed on an instant, tossing off the thought with a wave of her hand. "You brought him back from pasture. I'm sure his relations thank you for that."
"That wasn't my intention at all! This is his home! We were going to be married! We have every right to live here!" She caught the defensive note in her voice and clamped her lips together, which only emphasized her annoyance. "You know what? Forget it," she dismissed. "You wouldn't understand."
"Oh, but I think I do," her guest assured, ignoring this exclusionary snit. "If a serpent love thee, wear him as a necklace. It's an old Arabic expression advising the succor of that which is most dangerous in order to reap its every reward. As dark and difficult and dangerous a man as your husband appears to be, he is still a prince fully-equipped with a legend, an empire and a castle. You would wear them all like gemstones tucked tightly at the hollow of your throat. And who could blame you for this? Not I," she insisted earnestly. "To my eye? Tonight? It's a prize you've earned."
"You think I married him for his title?" she shot back vexedly, her face screwed to an intemperate knot. "You couldn't be more wrong. I love Nikolas for the person he is on the inside, not his wealth or his power or the fact that he's a prince. It's not about what he owns. It's the Nikolas here," she proclaimed, tapping a furious fist to her chest. "Who he is in his heart."
"I see," observed Esme shrewdly. "It's the mettle of a man for you, then? Not so much his status but his sense of himself and the role he plays. Rebel? Rogue? Pirate?" she offered with a whisper of amusement. "Intoxicating, isn't it? The scent of the non-conformist? If only we could bottle that fragrance, think how many hearts we'd spare. Still, you must admit to the allure of his legacy. He's a Cassadine, after all. They're driven by the devils of their past."
"Now you see, you don't know him at all! Nikolas doesn't concern himself with the past. He's far too busy building us a future." Part of what she hated most about the Cassadines was their mistaken belief that they knew her husband better than anyone else, better even than his wife. They did not, and this authoritative tone they took never failed to drive her up the wall. She was relieved, for once, to see Mrs. Landsbury coming through the door with tea. It was good to be interrupted, good to have a moment to recover a more hospitable pose. As the cups were passed and their sugars and creams blended to satisfaction, she swore to herself to take control of what remained of the conversation. She would not be mired in the same old argument she'd had with his relations countless times before.
"I'm guessing Maximillian is driven by his past," she stated, setting her spoon to the saucer and lifting her tea to drink. "It's not surprising when you consider the profession he's chosen."
"Or the job he's been sent to do," Lady Cardiff acquiesced with a nod. "Maxim is, at this moment, quite consumed by the past. He seeks to understand. Once he does he will cast off this irritatingly flexible and forgiving demeanor. Until then, he is a man of allowances." Esme tested the temperature of the tea, then took a measured sip. "Do you ever wonder how much pressure that must put on the Cassadine soul? The making of allowances? It's a true sufferance for them. Stefan labored for decades to grasp the rudiments of the concept. Stavros refused to consider even the pretense of an attempt."
"And that's what makes Nikolas different from the rest of his family," asserted Emily, warming to the issue she had, only moments ago, resolved to avoid. "He knows how to adjust. He lives in the real world, not some dusty medieval illusion. He won't allow himself to be restricted by some archaic concept of who he should be. He's a free man and he knows it. He answers only to himself. And if the Cassadines have a problem with that, well then the Cassadines be damned."
"Or the Cassadines be dead," quipped Esme with the malicious arch of a brow. "You don't find it troublesome, then? That he's striving to be a maverick in a family of renegades? The only way to succeed at this would be to walk what you call 'the straight and narrow', something I can assure you no Cassadine has ever done. You can see how his spirit struggles against it. The sins come so naturally, yet their punishments must be imposed. He must choose shame, censure, penance and redemption; none of which slip easily down the meekest of Cassadine throats." She shivered expressively, miming a desire to shake the image off. "I'm amazed all those choking noises don't keep you up at night."
Emily had lost the thread of her guest's contention somewhere around the proposition that the Cassadines were a family of renegades and, no matter how long she looked or how hard she squinted, she couldn't manage to pick it up again. Suddenly someone was choking in the night and she wasn't sure whether to be nodding in agreement or righteously taking offense. It didn't help that the woman was so disturbingly beautiful or that her words, as cryptic as they were, seemed dispensed like tokens in some clever little game. "Nikolas and I are very happy," she pronounced, drawing back from the subject once more. "If this is one of those questions his relatives sent you here to ask, you can go ahead and tell them that."
"Oh, I can't think that answer would serve to do anything but undercut him, can you? Happy?" Lady Cardiff weighed the word as she sank thoughtfully back into her chair. "No Cassadine is happy. They wouldn't believe it for an instant. Satisfied, perhaps. Now there's an assertion one could fill with any number of strategic implications. But then you must know I am not the one they sent to make such determinations. They will not take their impressions from me. I have no standing here beyond that of Maxim's companion and friend."
Emily nodded, struck by a twinge of sympathy on this admission. She often felt excluded by her husband's family; dismissed out-of-hand as an inconsequence; disqualified from their more serious conversations for her ignorance of their ways. Stefan had done it. And Helena. Alexis, too. And there were those awful, awful instances - rare, it had happened only once or twice - when Nikolas himself drew a line between them, vehemently insisting there were Cassadine matters she simply couldn't comprehend. This woman's confession to standing on the fringes, those very same fringes Emily felt herself so frequently consigned to, offered up the tenuous thread of sisterhood in her heart. It was something she could understand.
"Did you really hold a knife to Lucky's throat?" she inquired, curious but with the proper shade of condemnation in her tone.
"He broke into our home," her guest asserted. "Were Maxim to take similar liberties I have no doubt you would have done the same. In fact, I remember hearing somewhere that when you caught Nikolas breaking into the Quartermaine mansion on the orders of Lorenzo Alcazar, you attempted to hold him at gunpoint."
"Well, I didn't know it was Nikolas. I never got a look at his face."
"And I didn't know it was Lucky Spencer, though to be honest it wouldn't have made a difference if I had. I will not allow Maxim to be endangered by anyone for any reason at any time. And I will tell you this as well, if your husband returns him in anything less than the condition in which he left he will answer for it, prince or no."
That small spark of sisterly affection flickered and went out. Emily frowned, looking down to take a peevish glance at her watch. Thirty minutes and it seemed like an eternity. She couldn't wait for her husband to get back. Where were they? What was taking so long?
"What's your interest in Cameron Lewis?"
"As it pertains to your uncle's death?"
"Does it?"
"A peripheral presence, at best. I suspect he operated at one point, or perhaps at all points, as your aunt's somewhat inconvenient conscience. Not that he lobbied for the job or that she desired him to function in that capacity. There are people we meet who seem to fall quite naturally into needed positions. I sense there was a time she required a kind of moral touchstone. Doctor Lewis complied."
After a long, and what appeared to him to be circuitous walk through the forest they finally arrived at the bluff, Nikolas spreading his arm out grandly to indicate his cousin's request had been met. Here, at last, was the site of his death. And while Maxim would have preferred to examine this cliff - its lip, its cant, its trajectory, and the dismal distance his father's body had to tumble in pursuit of its broken soul - he found his own body unequal to the task. His strength was gone, his muscles stretched past the limits of their endurance by the unremitting motion he'd been forced to keep them in. The quick march to the rockface, the stand, the start, the strut up this hill, all of it accompanied by carefully-composed answers to equally cautious questions combined to thieve every ounce of his energy and left him completely drained. He had yet to betray this fact to his host by the slightest wheeze or shortness of breath, but the effort it took to hide the truth was growing larger by the minute and he knew its revelation was inevitable. He compelled himself to saunter to a stone at the edge of the clearing, brushed the dirt from its surface and, without a hint of the relief he felt, lowered himself to its seat.
"Florida is a long way to go to investigate a peripheral presence."
"Well," he qualified lightly as the tendons in his thighs began to thrum. "There was Zander."
"There, you see?" exclaimed Nikolas, striding stalwartly to the precipice as if it held no memory for him, not the slightest meaning at all. Brave, forgetful, self-deceiving prince. "Your methods make no sense to me. It's as if you go further and further afield. If Lewis had a negligible role in my uncle's death, his son had even less."
"I disagree," Maxim disputed, plucking the scrap of a leaf from his sleeve. "If you could mark the one turning point in those last few months of his life, what would it be? What action did he take that set his foot firmly on the path to this bluff? What maneuvered him, irrevocably, in the direction of his death? You would concede, would you not, that it was his rather disturbingly antithetical choice to throw your wife off this cliff? It's his signature sin, in the end. The sin that sends him soundly down the road to hell. He loses you, your aunt, any empathetic effort that may have been mustered on his behalf to save him, spare him, spin him about from the eventual deliverance of a reckoning. That one conspiratorial act, though it failed in every aspect, was enough to mark him lost to the world as he knew it and it knew him."
"And Zander had a part in this…how?"
"That's not the first question, nor the most immediate," Maxim intoned, shaking his head dissuasively. "We must begin by looking at the victim, or his intended victim in any event. Your wife, who was not your wife at that time but well on her way to becoming the wife of a completely different man. Who was she? Why was she there? How did she enter the landscape of your uncle's perception? What made her an obstacle worthy of his regard? Worthy of mounting a defense so clearly counter to his nature? What threat could she possibly pose to a man like Stefan Cassadine? In order to answer these questions, to arrive at the underlying cause or reason for his death, we must fix our sights on the woman he chose to kill. And when you delve into the identity, the personality and the primal provocation of Emily Quartermaine as she existed at that time, you come perforce into the presence and profound influence of her lover, Zander Smith."
Nikolas bristled at the snap of each linear conjecture to its place, his face darkening to scowl beneath the spill of a divulging moonlight. He turned abruptly to the harbor, offering his guest the blank slate of his back, and rolled his shoulders to ease his hostility, forcing its return to the place from which it came. "He wasn't her lover then," he declared, opting to counter the least significant yet undoubtedly most objectionable supposition the man had had the temerity to make.
Maxim shrugged in his shadowed seat and took the opportunity this prince's back afforded to knead the fire flaring in his knees. "You asked how Zander played a part. You must have a thought of your own? To your mind, what was the cause of your uncle's death?"
"And he had no influence over her either, profound or otherwise. Emily made her own decisions," he pronounced, his head half-turned, his attention only half-committed to Maxim. "We all suffered for that," he added with a grunt.
"Yes. Yes, I expect you did. It's obvious who held the power in that dynamic. Her motives, though. These were much harder to ascertain. Hence the need to travel to Florida, to discover what kind of man could inspire so great a love in a woman that she would unthinkingly and without a drop of malice mount such a desperate deception to hide the true state of her health. The lengths she went to…well, I don't think it's going too far to describe them as extraordinary."
"Emily is an extraordinary woman," Nikolas concurred.
"Is she? I don't know her, of course," Maxim amended swiftly as the prince's gaze drew sharply around. "Given the right circumstances, I've found most of us are capable of going to similarly extravagant lengths. I wonder, though, that it didn't bother you to turn her heart away from so selfless a love. That she loved him is plain and he, as I understand it, loved her back in equal measure. Such a rare thing to own. Priceless, in its way."
"Her heart turned of its own accord," Nikolas exhorted flatly, his temper twitching restively between each of these purposeful words. "I told you she makes her own decisions."
"So you did, so you did," Maxim sustained, nodding them into a savage silence.
He wasn't sure why he found it so astonishing - the revelation of the impenetrable barrier his cousin had erected to protect himself against the ghosts of his past. His many unwitting and unwary deflections. His obsessive fixation on just those truths he needed to believe, as if it were a matter of survival to him. For him, in a decisively delusive way. Hadn't he adopted similar measures himself? Hadn't he designed his denials, pulled them, pushed them and stretched them taut to fit squarely over the length and breadth of his father's more daunting derangements? Those many, many inexplicable insanities that had come to overwhelm him at the last? There was a difference, though. A distinction between them his heart refused to allow him to ignore. Here, standing before him in this restless, refractive pose, was the boy who had greedily devoured decades of his father's existence; sucked him dry with his wants and his needs and the weaning of his every weakness. Here was the truculent treasure to whom he'd given his spirit, the sum of his soul, the entirety of his focus from the instant of its escape from the womb. Here, hidden in the body of this puckish belligerence, lay the essence of his father's sacrifice; the substance of his self-denial; the blood and bone, the pith and marrow of that sadly absolute renunciation of whatever life he might have led, could have led, should have led had heaven let him, had hell released its hold. And in consideration of the depth of that unwavering commitment, that unsparingly self-suppressive choice, Maximillian Cassadine felt there should be a commensurate level of reflective respect. Of honor. Of gratitude. Of humbled, hallowed thanks. And instead of that, instead of this potent, put-upon prince loving him, lamenting him, wrangling for a rhyme or reason for his theft, it was left to the son he'd never truly known, never truly had or held or promoted, the one who'd been all but forgotten, to hunt down an understanding of his loss. It wasn't right. It wasn't just. And it couldn't be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, to be even remotely acceptable.
"Shall we go, then?" asked this prince - a rhetorical question as it turned out; his having already stalked across the clearing to step back on the path that led to the house.
Maxim braced his hands to the rock and thrust himself to his feet, stifling the groan these aching muscles begged him to expend. Go. Yes, they should go. And he knew, without question, they would end in going to places they'd never been before. Dangerous places. Damaging places. Places saner men would certainly avoid. It was unlikely they were headed in the same direction, or would reach their destinations together. But they had started. The journey had begun. And one could only hope, however treacherous the course, they could manage to complete it alive.
"You can't honestly believe he wants to tell me anything."
He'd spit this statement from a head between knees to an ear so close it brushed his shoulder every time the launch crested a wave. The weakness in his voice alarmed her; the sluggish way he moved, his leaden eye; this lethargy of mood. He was clearly tapping his reserves - tolerance, strength, breath - whatever share of stamina he'd provisioned for crisis, whatever hadn't been spent on their cruelly absurd trek across the island. She could kill that puerile prince just for this, self-indulgent half-wit that he was. A child. He was nothing but a child with a stick in search of something meaningful to beat.
She scooted closer on the bench, hip-to-solid-hip, and tightened her grip of his back. "Zimi, there is nothing here for you. Don't you understand that? He could tell you everything he knows and it wouldn't fill an hour, it wouldn't shine a light. I doubt if it would even make sense. Do you think he spends the bulk of his evenings reliving those events? Examining them? Questing for a reason? He does not. They are monsters in his closet. He runs from them. He cries out for Mama and Mama comes with her fantastical tales of pirates and tattoos. He has not faced this, Zimi. And it is not so very far-fetched to suspect that whatever answers he gets he will end up getting from you."
"But he was there…" Half a sentence now; half a gasp. All went flagging but the fiercest of convictions. How he had made it back to the mansion, hidden his condition, offered his good-byes - she could not imagine what it took.
"And you were not. I know," she soothed. "But you cannot pin your hopes on this witness, in the same way you cannot ask a deaf man what he's heard or a blind man what he's seen. Nikolas Cassadine, while he may have been present at the time, cannot afford to recall his uncle's death from any but the most shallow, self-aggrandizing perspective. You'll find as much satisfaction in that as you would the brass-balled tales of Luke Spencer. Truth is not the currency in distribution here, Maxim. Would you exchange what's left of your soul for a pocketful of lies?"
He'd had enough. She could see it, sense it in the slump of his torso, in the weary weight of his bones. There would be no more objections tonight, no more argument with what she said. Only silence now, and sleep. Sleep and insufferable dreams. She held him close and rocked him slow, kissing his heavy head. If he thought he was going to that cabin after this…well, he could just think again.
Requiem (18)
A man who fixed his eyes
with longing on the sun
might see the sun stand still
while he himself was carried
east on the turning earth
swept blinded into night:
so did I love some one
once, like Copernicus.
No, no, he'd said, ushering her in and shuffling to shut the door behind her. No, no, he'd asserted with a short sharp cough he tried to hide beneath the clearing of his throat. No, no, with a hand rising to halt the protest of the woman slipping soundless down the stairs. No, I'm fine, I'm fine, how are you, he'd pressed, and the woman looked at him as if he were mad, unforgivably insane. Then her grim gaze shifted to shame his unnecessary guest. Do you see? Do you see? And Maxie saw. She saw the weakness in him - the sallow shade of his pale, pale skin, the plum-bruised smudge of the rings beneath his eyes, the way his shoulders bent with the weight of the bulky Irish-knit sweater he wore. Her hand wanted to rise, the back of her hand, to touch his head, to test the temperature of his brow, because clearly there was something to worry about here. Clearly there was reason for concern. Yet she felt, somehow, that he was pleading with her not to; beseeching her to refrain. Please, please, don't do that. Those storm blue eyes locked and charging; the persistent urge of a tiny, tense remnant of his pride. She should leave, she should leave, she knew it now in the same way she knew he'd be hurt if she did. Genuinely wounded. It was like kittens and puppies and baby's tears; provoking this need to soothe, to reassure him she would stay. She hadn't a clue what to do at all and no one would give her an answer. Which left her to make a choice.
"I'm okay," she announced, shrugging the jacket from her shoulders. "But you look like you need to sit down." She reached for his hand and led him to the couch, pointing at the cushion he should take. He made a feeble pass at courtesy with a ladies-first sweep of his arm, but she refused this, refused to be coddled, and brought her fists to her hips to inform him who was boss. "I work at a hospital, you know. It's no big deal to make a call."
Maxim huffed in mock-disgust and fell to the seat she gave him. "I tell you I'm fine," he insisted, scowling at the fuss. "I don't know what everyone's so concerned about here."
"Blah blah blah," she disclaimed, glancing up to the frustrated face of the woman standing behind him. "I'm not buying that, are you?"
"Blah blah blah?" he echoed, squinting in peevish disbelief.
"Yes, blah blah blah, Maxim," affirmed his housemate sternly. "An appropriate description of the waste of your words. Really, if you don't plan on saying anything of substance perhaps you shouldn't speak at all."
His head bounced back and forth between these women, seeing they'd come to terms, and he released a fitful groan. "I'm not ill," he persisted, collapsing back into a pillow with the knowledge no one was listening anymore. "One night of poor sleep and you'd think I'd contracted the plague! Insomnia runs in the family, you know."
"As does lunacy, Maxim. Shall we have a doctor in to detect the difference for us?"
Maxie stifled a smile at the rolling of his eyes on this prickled taunt from his Djinn, forcing herself instead to respond to the symptoms of his condition. "Has he eaten at all?" she asked his companion.
"Has food passed through that perverse portal of a mouth? No, I can't think it has. He's been far too busy complaining about the soundness of his health to put those jaws to such a secondary and superfluous purpose."
"I had tea," he pronounced obstinately, his arms crossing over his chest to emphasize this contradicting truth.
"She asked about food, not drink. Shall we have that hearing checked as well? Perhaps I should make our doctor a list."
"A sandwich. You could have a sandwich," Maxie suggested brightly, beginning to feel sorry for him now. He looked so very wretched sitting there, stubbornly fending off these gibes. She watched him pull his sweater tighter at the waist, aligning its placket and the stitch of its weave, and knew he was embarrassed by the fretting almost more than the physical weakness itself. If asked she was certain he would say that what he needed, upon reflection, was just to be left alone. It would be a lie, of course. A distancing insistence she'd used so often she could mark the ploy on sight. Get away, get away, get away from me, when all you wanted was for someone to move closer, for someone to give a damn. She'd spare him that, and this, and the rest of the torment - it was time to make a deal.
"Tell you what," she tendered in her firmest and most dogged negotiating voice. "Djinn will make you a sandwich and I'll go upstairs and pick out a box. You eat and I'll tell you a story. Or two. Or five. As many as you like. You want to hear those stories, right? Well, here I am making good on my promise. Does that sound like it will work for you?"
His lips pursed contentiously. A long minute passed as he deliberated her offer and its attendant cost to his dignity. Judging the price affordable, he conceded with a prim nod of his head. "You'll eat as well?" he wrangled, determined to set his own condition on the pact.
"If you lean back and put your feet up, I'll take any sandwich you've got," she agreed, looking to Djinn to see if this arrangement met with her approval. The woman responded with a begrudging grunt and a brief, very brief yet evident, flash of acknowledged respect. Maxie's heart leapt with joy to see she'd managed to find a solution everyone could live with, and she broke into a small, self-satisfied grin at what could certainly be considered a deftly-delivered success. She watched Djinn set off for the kitchen and waited for Maxim to lift his legs to the couch - a reluctant act she had to push along with an adamant, accusatory glare - then turned to make good on her part of the bargain and hurried up the stairs.
She entered the smaller, guest bedroom and spied the initial box she'd surrendered precisely where she'd left it, joined now by the later arrivals stacked in a column to the side. As she spread the cartons out in front of her and lifted each of the cardboard lids she could see the contents hadn't been touched. All of Zander's belongings lay exactly as she'd packed them. So many times had she studied these things, held them, stroked them, gently and with the most careful care teased out their every memory, that she would have known at once if even one had been disturbed. They were safe. He'd kept them safe, even from his own curiosity, and she found that fact deeply reassuring. As hard as it had been to lose them, to know they were gone, she thought she could almost believe what he'd said - that she was simply storing them in a different place. His place. And while it may not be the best place, it looked like a good place all the same.
Her knees bent, her legs folding beneath her as she took a seat on the floor and set herself to the business of deciding which of Zander's stories should come first. Should she go box-by-box or try to create a timeline? Should she start at the beginning or work backward from the end? And what about those items he'd owned that she didn't have a story for; things that had struck her as odd for him to keep, so odd that a niggling instinct inside her insisted they must have meaning? This baby monitor, for one. Was it something he'd bought when he was caring for Kristina, or had he held on to a desperate hope it would be part of his own child's life? Was that child Cameron or some fantasy baby with Emily? Why had he kept it? What did it mean? It was the same with other things, little things, seemingly inconsequential things. The star chart of Orion's Belt. The yard-length strip of carnival tickets. This old romance novel she'd tried to read that was just too silly for words. It had been bookmarked with an appointment card for a session of chemotherapy and she imagined this must mean it was Emily's, but beyond that? Maxie had no history for these, no reasoning at all, and saved them only because Zander had; because, in some incalculable way, to him they'd been special. Where should they go in the order of the stories she'd tell? Should they be included at all? She didn't know, and as she became more and more consumed with this question of arrangement, time crept past.
"Well, it worked."
She startled at the sound of the voice and twisted around to discover Djinn standing in the doorway. "I'm almost ready. I am," she insisted, rushing to pack the last of Zander's things into the box she'd chosen to take.
"No, no. He's fallen asleep, which is a fine resolution to all our problems. I won't have to listen to him lie anymore, and I can't think you would have enjoyed launching those stories against the barricade of his tediously insufferable mood. It's best to let him be now," his companion assured her. "Best to let those dreams burrow through the rock."
There was sense in what she said, and it was good news too, yet Maxie couldn't help but fall beneath the towering wave of disappointment that came to crest and crash and flood over all the careful plans she'd made. Her mental list was composed; each and every memory finally sorted to an order. She was ready for…well, for nothing it turned out. Her gaze drifted to the floor, her hands busying themselves to set the lid on the carton she'd filled with so many good intentions. "What's the matter with him?" she asked, struggling to hide her despair behind this meaningless, throwaway question. "Has he caught the flu?"
"God grant us no!" Djinn rebuked in horror. Maxie looked up just in time to catch those golden fingers flick in a curious countering gesture, as if they meant to warn a demon off. "He cannot be sick again. He simply won't survive it."
"Why? What happened to him?" she demanded, now in earnest; setting her dashed hopes aside in favor of this new and slightly worrisome little mystery. She spun in a circle on the rug and gave the woman her full attention, her expectation of an answer written plainly on her face.
"Ah, a very long story," Djinn disclosed through a negating frown. "And one I'm certain he'd be loathe to think was common knowledge to the general public."
"I won't tell anyone. I promise."
The woman's gaze narrowed abruptly, as if calling into question the warrant of such trust, and Maxie bore the glare of those keen dark eyes without flinching. An intensely analytical moment passed during which the request was considered with marked deliberation. She seemed to come to a decision then and crossed the threshold into the room, pulling the sole chair out from the wall to angle it in Maxie's direction. She sat, somewhat reluctantly, her glance lifting time and time again as if in judgment of the wisdom of her choice. Maxie could see she was uncomfortable and might, if this were another man and another kind of secret, have let her off the hook. But this was Maxim. And this was his health. And, yes, she wanted to know. Almost had to know. So Djinn was just going to have to get over it.
The woman's eyes closed, her head tilting forward as she searched for a place to begin. It wasn't easy, that seemed clear. Her lips would part with a word, then press together with a second thought and grimace on a third; her smooth brow knitting to pinch a wrinkle atop the bridge of her nose. Her fingers flexed in her lap, a toe tapped, a sharp tooth appeared to puncture the somber swell of another frown. Eventually, finally, and with no small vexation, she committed herself to a start.
"Maxim met his father late in life," Djinn allowed, dispensing her words with exquisite care, as if each one were fragile and possessed of inestimable value. "It was a hard meeting. They were hard men who had made hard choices to find one another again. And so their love, when they found it, was a hard love. The kind of love that laughs at distance, that ridicules Time and Space, that mocks the world. To see them together was to know what it had cost them to be apart, what they were forced to fashion from their pain. It wasn't so much a bond as it was a fusing, do you understand?"
Maxie nodded silently, fearful of breaking this woman's faith that she deserved to hear this story. She could already tell how rarely it was told and, even then, only to those selected souls deemed possessed of the predilection to respect it.
Djinn examined this reaction closely and, satisfied to see the girl had grasped the gravity of the matter, relaxed just enough to lean back in the chair. "They were very much alike in temperament. Intellectual. Inquisitive. Dry and dauntingly intelligent men. Anyone given the duty to describe them would have called them cerebral. Which is why it was so shocking to witness the raw, impetuous physicality of their relationship." She paused here to shake her head, bemused by the memory. "They would push each other into pools," she relayed in a tone of reflective amazement. "Fully clothed, with no thought to reserve or decorum. His father could be on the phone conducting business, Zimi sitting dockside with a book, they didn't care. One would creep, the other cry foul and sputter, spewing the water from his mouth. Then a hand would come. A hand would always come to drag the drowned man out. And they would laugh. How they would laugh."
Maxie met her eyes and they shared a smile until the glow in the woman's face faded; flickered like a faraway star and went out. "Water was the catalyst, I think. Be it a pool or a pond, an ocean or a lake…no memories there, not a one. Nothing to come screaming like fire through your mind, to gut your heart with its hungry flame. Water was safe, like a great blank page no one had thought to write upon or ruin with an angry scrawl of rage. And so they met at the water, built on the water, owned the water as their prize for living so many years apart and in pain."
Djinn's back arched and stiffened, the telling of her story growing cold and more precise. Maxie leaned forward, on pins and needles now, sensing something profoundly bleak lay beating just beneath this alteration in tone.
"One summer, not so long ago, his father was called away to attend to a family emergency and there was nothing left for Zimi to do but return to Petersburg and his work. There was no way to know when they might meet again, such was the fluctuating nature of the crisis. But they made a promise, a vow in truth, to travel to Geneva for a day. A single day, a single afternoon they planned to spend on the water, sailing in celebration of Zimi's birth. So many birthdays he'd missed, this father. He had sworn with the ruthless intensity of a Bedu's blood oath not to miss those left."
Soft, so soft the syllables hardly had the strength to cross the air between them, she revealed, "We didn't hear of his death until after he'd been buried. Even then, we didn't believe it. Zimi refused, absolutely refused to allow even for the possibility. Lies, all lies and strategies, he said as we faithfully boarded that plane to Geneva. You'll see, he said as we buckled our belts and the engines roared and the quaking wings drew us aloft. He'll be there, Djinn, just you wait and see. This is my father. He gave his word. I have my father's word. As if it were the whispered pledge of a god," she scoffed, a heart-torn laugh emerging from her lips as her voice broke and a tear escaped the well of one shining, bittersweet eye. She banished this emotional betrayal with the fierce flick of her thumb, still shaking her head, still laughing that sadly incredulous laugh.
"He was not there, of course. Not at the house or on the dock, but Zimi took the boat out nonetheless. Alone. He would be alone for this, but he left me with a challenge. You tell my father when he comes that I have taken full advantage of his miscalculation and beat him to the open water. I leave him the skiff and dare him to catch up. Thunder sounded then, and you could see a lone, pregnant cloud scraping its way across the horizon. I shook my head, reaching to take a sensible grip of his shoulder, but Zimi stepped back beyond my grasp. If he can, he laughed, and I knew when I looked into those fevered eyes that nothing would hold him. Nothing would keep him ashore." She shivered, as if to erase the memory, the palms of her hands pressing to run down the length of her thighs. "Life gave me many days afterward to regret this moment - to regret standing aside as he freed his ropes and threw them to the deck, to regret allowing him the leap aboard, to regret not leaping myself. Yet always it comes down to this. Had he not gone out on the lake that day, alone, with hope alive in his heart, he would still be waiting for his father. He would still believe, with a crippling conviction, that his father was alive. Think of it. Weeks and months and years he would spend biding in silence, without a word. Was his father in trouble? Injured? On the run? Had he been captured? Imprisoned? Tortured? Was he lying in some far-off hospital suffering, screaming and dying alone? It would destroy him. It would destroy me. And so…and so…"
"And so he accepted his dad was dead," Maxie supplied sympathetically.
Djinn nodded, relinquishing the fractious tangle of her guilt. "The water told him. The wind told him. The sky told him. And when he didn't believe them, the storm came to pound it in. He was ten hours out," she confessed, her sad gaze lifting to stare into the space just above her listener's head. "The last eight spent at the heart of the squall, fighting to stay afloat. Fighting to stay intact. Fighting not to hear what the storm had come to say. It was morning when they brought him back to me, unconscious and spent of every strength." She chuffed a breath and shrugged the image off, closing her eyes yet again. "Hospitals, monitors, oxygen tents, tubes and needles and drugs. He was dying. They said it was pneumonia but I knew it was his soul."
"But he survived. He got better," Maxie soothed, thinking to skip to the happy end and save the woman any further torment.
"Months. It took him months to recover enough to mount a flight of stairs. I kept him in Geneva, made a sickroom of the library and brought him his papers every day. That was a mistake," Djinn disclosed, a thin thread of anger weaving through her words. "Among all the papers we subscribed to he insisted on including that pathetic little newssheet of yours. The Herald?" she spat with ire. "There were Cassadines in Port Charles, he said. Cassadines he knew, or had heard of in any event. And then you had that fire. In the hotel?"
"The Port Charles Hotel?" probed Maxie, a memory or two of her own rousing at the mention of this event. Seeing the woman's resentful nod, she lowered her eyes to the carpet. "Yeah. Yeah, we had that."
"Something he read pushed him out of that bed and drove him to the phone. Before I knew it we had reservations on a plane to the United States. You must understand, the doctors insisted he could not fly. He was forbidden to take a plane. Do you think he listened? No," she seethed, her sarcasm coming to the fore. "What could a doctor know, after all? Who was a doctor to tell the great Maximillian Cassadine what he could and could not do?" Her jaw tightened, her words thrusting through the barrier of clenching teeth. "We were on layover at Heathrow when the sickness hit. A virulent strain of influenza his immune system, so severely weakened by pneumonia, could now no longer resist. And back to the hospital we went; to the tubes and the needles and the clucking tongues of physicians who rightly upbraided him for the foolishness of his choice. You work in a hospital. You understand the danger here, yes? The tolerance a body builds to counteractive medications? The standard antibiotic no longer worked for him. You might as well have been dispensing a fistful of sugared placeboes," she derided with the careless wave of a hand. "They were compelled to prescribe stronger drugs at much higher dosages, and this just to keep him clinging to life. He grew thin; his cheeks hollow, his features drawn and gaunt. His skin, once flushed and ruddy, grew pale as you see it today. His hair turned brittle and broke when we brushed it; its color and texture changing beneath the onslaught of the nearly toxic level of powerful medications they gave. His biochemistry altered in the process and is only now beginning to return to its natural state. Did he heal? In a way, yes. In a way, no. His endurance for prolonged physical activity is virtually non-existent. His blood has thinned; his heart still pumps faster than it should. He is always cold, cold to the bone. So cold that without some warmth beside him he cannot sleep at night. And then there is the grief, this immensity of sorrow he carries in his soul. Like a weight it pulls him down. It was a mistake to come here," she concluded on a sigh. "It is a mistake to stay."
"But why did he come in the first place?" Maxie asked, unable to see a legitimate reason for him to be taking such a risk with his health. "Does it have something to do with the fire? With Nikolas? I mean, they're both Cassadines so you just kind of assume it's family business. Is it because they thought he was dead? Because they thought he'd killed his grandmother? Maxim knew Stefan. He said so. Does it have something to do with that?"
Djinn offered a tired smile and gripped the arms of the chair, rising from its seat. "All very good questions. Though, I think we both know, I am not the one you should be asking."
Maxie, her mind now filled with mysteries and fired by curiosity, reluctantly pushed herself off the floor, glancing back at her boxes to make sure they were fully-packed and closed. "I suppose I should go," she lamented.
"You could," Djinn replied as she crossed to the door. "If you have another obligation it would no doubt be best. If not? Well, I would consider it a special favor if you decided to stay. Zimi had every expectation of spending his morning with his great friend Max and I don't think it would be fair to punish him for falling asleep in advance of that, do you?"
"No," she agreed in a grave little voice, fighting a losing battle with the grin that threatened to stretch across her face. "You're right, that wouldn't be fair at all." She gestured to a carton behind her, the one she'd chosen to make her start, and Djinn tipped her head in consent.
"I'd like him to sleep as long as he can. Will that be a problem?"
"Nope," Maxie chirped above the lid of her box as they made their way out into the hall. "Don't worry about me. I've got all day."
And while that may not have been true just a few short hours ago, it was definitely, most definitely, completely true as she saw things now.
Poetic Attributions (The Introductory Lines)
Chapter 16 - from the poem Below Freezing, by the poet Tomas Transtromer
Chapter 17 - from the writings of the Persian poet Jelaluddin Rumi
Chapter 18 - from the poem Sentences After Defence of Poetry, by the poet Paul Goodman
