Six rules undying book 2, p.5
Six (Rules Undying Book 2), page 5
“Would you laugh at me if I said I did?” she finally asked.
“Why do you care what I think?” Lorcan asked. “If it’s what you believe, be proud of it.”
“You think I’m ridiculous, don’t you?”
“I think it would be . . . arrogant of mankind to think that they were all alone, arrogant and sad,” he said softly. “What I don’t understand, though, is why mankind keeps thinking that aliens built the pyramids, drew the Nazca Lines, and all that. That is the only bit of alien lore that I don’t understand.”
“I guess people don’t believe that men with sticks and stones could build some of the greatest wonders on this planet,” Paige said.
She gnawed a bit on her lip. “My dad thinks it’s all a conspiracy.”
“But what do you think?”
“I think mankind needs more faith in itself,” she said sadly.
Lorcan smiled, showing off some very crooked but white teeth.
“What if I told you on very good authority that plain, old, ordinary humans built those pyramids? That I’m sure your father is wrong about that?”
“You sound very sure.”
“My grandfather was quite the expert on Egyptian construction.
He told me how it was done,” Lorcan said.
“Well, somehow I don’t think he was there, so his guess is as good as anyone’s. At least that’s what my dad would say.”
“Oh, how do you know he wasn’t there? I’m older than I look, you know,” Lorcan said, smiling again.
“Really? What’s your secret?”
He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Staying out of the sun. I have to keep this Irish tan going.”
Paige shuddered slightly as she felt a strange man’s breath in her ear, but she managed to laugh it off. “I’ll remember that.”
Lorcan and Paige both leaned back to watch the stars some more. Eventually she noticed that his arm stretched along the back and that she had been leaning against it for a while. She didn’t dare move, but she became more and more focused at the lean, pale, rather well-built forearm just inches away from wrapping around her bare shoulder.
“It would be rather wondrous for mankind to realize it isn’t alone,” Lorcan said, turning from the stars to look right at Paige. “But I wonder if it would also be dangerous. Mankind can be terrible if united against something that’s different, something alien. I suppose we can just hope we are both alive to see such a day, Paige.”
The moment happened. She felt his arm close around her.
Instead of jerking her close or anything powerful and romantic, she watched in wonder as he plucked a tiny gray form off her skin and tossed it into the night air.
“Did you just set a mosquito free?” she asked as she leaned forward to escape any contact with the rogue arm.
“What can I say? I’m sympathetic to her plight,” Lorcan said. “I mean, if we’re just specks, maybe we should be more considerate to those smaller than us.”
“Maybe we should,” Paige sighed as she started kicking her feet like a little girl. Spring had finally started fighting back against the heat, and a cool breeze sent her curls flying around her face. “I wonder if bacteria have any idea that they are tiny and that their universe is just a patch of my skin. Of course, they would need brains and consciousness, wouldn’t they?”
Lorcan looked away. “Oh, I think you’d be very surprised what bacteria are capable of doing.”
“Well, I suppose if you got enough of them, you could do something amazing. Look at the ones who clean up oil spills. Of course, too many little bugs could just cause an epidemic too. It’s hard to think about because we humans—” she said as she motioned to Lorcan and herself, “we humans get hung up on the scale of things. We discount the infinitesimal and ignore the gigantic.
It doesn’t even compute unless we can see it, right?”
Lorcan put his hand to his mouth and stifled a laugh. Paige furrowed her brows and glared at him. His laughter finally slipped out, and Paige jumped to her feet.
“Wait!” he said as he grabbed her hand.
“What’s so funny?” she snapped.
He pulled her gently back toward the bench. His eyes continued to sparkle as he confessed, “Have you ever been in on a conversation where you are the only one in on the joke?” he asked.
“It’s both frustrating and delightful.”
“So, what, I’m a joke to you?”
“No!” he protested. His accent shifted to one isle over from his normal English tones. “You are the first person in ages that has ever come close. You’re not the joke, my dear Paige; I am. I am that man who feels like the colony of bacteria living on a tiny blue speck. I am a . . . siphonophore drifting in the guise of something greater, a mockery of you, and you are the first real conversation I’ve had in so long, and I am most likely going to ruin it within the next fifteen seconds, so just let me say, Miss Paige, that you are wonderful and I am really bad at conversation.”
Paige continued to stare in fascination at the bizarre, pale-faced stranger who still held her hand. His hair had gone rogue as well, forming a dark wavy halo around his long features. She finally smiled again.
“Did you just call yourself a jellyfish?” she asked.
“You know what those beasts are?” he asked as his accent leaned back toward English.
“I was raised by three things: my mother, her waitstaff, and National Geographic. I wanted to be a paleontologist or a marine
biologist or some other sort of gist, but there was never money for that,” Paige confessed. “Also, math wasn’t really my thing.”
“Yet you do accounting,” Lorcan countered.
“I do busywork. A trained monkey could do what I do.”
“Then you should get back into the sciences; train one to take your place. I’m sure there is some way to get research funding, and if a monkey is too expensive, I’m bloody certain your average teenager makes a fine replacement—”
“You are insane!” Paige said, laughing.
“I’m Irish.”
“Then why do you sound English most of the time?”
“Lived there longer, and let’s just say my father thought it wise to sound like the locals. It hasn’t always been friendly between the two isles.”
“Your father wanted you to hide where you came from?”
Lorcan looked askance again. “Well, he was a . . . politician, an English politician. My mother and I were the Irish liabilities.”
“Oh, that’s awful. I’m sorry.”
“Well, he’s dead now, so it’s rather a moot point,” Lorcan sighed. “Now don’t get that face, Miss Paige. My father was a great man, but he wasn’t really a good one. We did a great deal of terrible things to one another, the kind of things you spend the rest of your life regretting, but in the end, I’m still his son, and I carry on as he would have wanted to. Those are really the only amends I can make, aren’t they?”
Paige nodded. This time she took his hand. “We all try to please our parents, don’t we? I guess it’s more difficult when their lives seem so much more important and interesting than our own,” she said. “But we . . . we really try.”
She took a few deep breaths and plastered on a smile. “This is so not your usual party conversation, is it?” she asked.
“That’s why I’ve enjoyed it so much, Miss Paige.”
“It’s getting late—”
“I feel like my night is just starting.”
“I need to go home,” she said a little more insistently. “If I stay talking much longer, I’ll end up finishing this second glass of wine,
and then I’ll have to wait to drive—”
“If you wait, we can talk more.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Paige confessed as she pulled away her hand. “I really should go. My boyfriend will be off soon, and—”
Lorcan stared right through her. “Ah, so that’s how it is.” He leaned in ever so close. “Do you think that this boyfriend has a reason to be worried?”
Paige jumped to her feet. “No, of course not! I’m sure your wife will want you home too,” she said pointedly.
Lorcan laughed out loud. “Well, I’m not flying to Detroit at eleven at night,” he said. “But if I see her again before June, I’ll be sure to give her your regards.”
“You’re separated?”
“We try not to see each other too often. I’d rather not run in to one of her many, many other interests if I can help it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What can I say? When you’re married for a rather long time, it just gets complicated.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in being a complication. Good night,” she said quickly as she headed back to the party. She could hear footsteps behind her. “I said, good night.”
- 3 -
Paige woke up alone in her bed. She tossed aside the covers and pulled her phone off the nightstand to begin her Sunday morning ritual.
“Slept over at Bobby’s. Hell night – Cal,” her last text read.
Bit by bit she did a once-over of the house, picking up socks and rogue dishes, changing out laundry, and sniffing the fridge. Once satisfied by the general order of things, she changed into sneakers, yoga pants, and a T-shirt and took a lazy morning walk around the lake. Every apartment complex in Memphis seemed to have at least one body of water at its heart—either a pool or a pond. Paige’s development managed to have both—filling the center of the buildings with peaceful open space and rippling water on an already warm spring morning.
She strolled this time, rather than run, and took in the vistas of pale yellow buildings with cream shutters, baby trees, and an empty playground. Once she had looped around the entire lake three times and her legs finally complained, she slipped back into her quiet one-bedroom and made up some oatmeal for breakfast.
Just as she was flicking through some pleasant enough cat videos on her phone, a loud banging sent her jumping from her seat.
“Paige! Paige, are you home?” an achingly familiar voice called from the door.
She yanked it open and just glared. “Dad, it’s nine a.m. on a Sunday. Respect the neighbors, please!” she hissed as she stepped out of his way.
The stereotypical professor in a blue button-down shirt and khaki pants came barreling into her apartment with a laptop and small pile of folders in hand. He dropped the whole mess right on her dining room table, nearly knocking coffee out of her freshly brewed cup.
“You didn’t answer my calls or my texts,” he said as he stared intently around the room with the same intense eyes as his daughter, but his were contained behind thick black-rimmed spectacles. He tugged at his graying ponytail of light brown waves as he continued to stare around the room.
“Coffee?” Paige finally asked as her father actually peeked at the tops of her lamps and ran his fingers over the bookshelves. He nodded as he continued the inspection.
“Are the men in black looking for you?” she asked snidely as she poured a second cup from her old-school Mr. Coffee. She mixed in two sugars and cream and sprinkled on cinnamon from the cabinet before returning to the table.
Dr. Carmichael did one more sweep, this time flipping over every cushion. He raised a brow as he found nothing more than an empty meat stick wrapper and some change in the couch crack. He rubbed his carefully messy yet tailored professor stubble and made a few “Hmm” noises before darting back to the table and yanking open his machine.
“Dad, seriously,” Paige said as he slurped his coffee loudly and stared at the screen but didn’t acknowledge the rather red-faced young woman staring at him from across the table.
“Patience, patience,” he said as the glow brightened. In the new light Paige could see a few new wrinkles and even more silver whiskers in his beard. He looked over toward the open bedroom door. “Didn’t you have a boyfriend or something?”
“He’s at a friend’s, and his name is Calvin,” she said curtly.
“Oh yeah, the cook, right?”
“Chef-in-training,” Paige corrected.
“Isn’t that a cook? Anyway, how are things?” he said, still looking at the screen.
“I’m fine,” she snapped.
“You didn’t cash the last three checks I sent you.”
“I didn’t need them.”
Dr. Carmichael looked over the screen and pointed to the self-assembled furniture and the framed video-game posters as the only décor in the room. “You can always use—”
“Is there a reason you came here at the crack of dawn on a Sunday, Dad?”
“Oh, you’ve been up since at least seven. You always were my little early bird,” he said while clicking away.
“Look, you can’t just drop in here after ignoring me for two seasons and a book tour and then expect—”
“I sent you updates all the time—”
“Twitter and cards with cash are not updates! It’s pathetic, so unless you are going to talk to me, you can march right back out to whatever groupie is tickling your fancy right now.”
He typed away for a good few seconds more before sighing, “I probably deserved that.”
“You talked to Mom already. What is so important that you actually bothered to stop by?”
“There is a conspiracy—”
“Dad, there is always a conspiracy with you. That’s why I almost ended up on a commune off the grid. Tell me something I don’t know!”
He slid one of his folders across the table. “Over the past few months I’ve gotten some letters and other messages. At first I thought they were crazy, but over time I started corroborating the stories—”
“Wow, someone you thought was crazy,” she muttered as she opened the folder. She flipped through articles on auctions and finance news, as well as some clippings about gruesome murders and a drunk driver killing two in California. She lifted up one of the top clippings; “‘Painting once thought lost to the Nazis, returned to family’?” she read.
“Look at the image.”
She looked at the pretty gold-framed landscape being shown to a frail old woman in a wheelchair. The man handing over the painting
conjured up images of eighties movie villains—a buff, bleached-blond Eastern European-looking fellow with a buzz cut and slightly slanted blue eyes.
“It’s a pretty painting, and I’m glad she got it back.”
“Now look at the one from California.”
She frowned as she read about a poor kid who had been run over by a drunk driver while on his way home from a graduation party. The picture of a chubby-cheeked half-Asian boy with spiked red hair sat inset among the words “Mikhail Lyashev, age eighteen.”
“Turn it over,” her father insisted.
She flipped over the article to see a familiar face. “So the fact that a guy who handed over a Nazi painting lost his son to a drunk driver is proof of a great conspiracy?” Paige asked.
“Ivan Lyashev, he’s one of the players, I’m sure of it,” Dr.
Carmichael said as he turned around his laptop. “Look here, Paige.”
She squinted to read. “It’s a paper on the manipulation of refraction indices for personal camouflage.”
“It’s brilliant. The man who wrote it is a revolutionary mind, way ahead of his time. I actually got to meet him once at a conference in Boston.”
“You went to a science convention, Dad?”
“No, it was Boston Comic Con. Turns out that this Rikuto Nakano is a huge fan of my show, but that’s not the point. For years he’s on the best and brightest lists and publishing papers on physics, theoretical math, and astronomy, and then poof, he writes this paper and disappears.”
“People don’t just disappear, Dad.”
“He did, but take a look at this one photo I got from his old Facebook page. I had to blow it up, but look in the background.”
Paige did pause as she saw a now familiar head of buzzed blond hair. “It could be a coincidence—”
“I’ve heard whispers of a blond half-Japanese, half-Russian poking about in conspiracy forums. As soon as you mention anything about him, the post is deleted or discredited or worse. One of my sources calls him ‘Ivan Ryugo,’ like Ivan Drago but . . . more
Japanese. I think that this Ivan Lyashev might very well be the Ryugo!”
“OK,” Paige said before taking a long sip of coffee, “and you think he’s connected to a missing scientist.”
“More than one. Dr. Michael Yoshida presented a paper on staphylococcal pneumonia in Orlando and just vanished. Wait till you see this.”
He opened up a picture on his screen.
“Wow, Dr. Yoshida is pretty good looking,” Paige muttered as she saw a rather young, tall Asian man in a ponytail and adorable horn-rimmed glasses standing behind a podium. Her grin faded a little as she saw the profile of a blond-haired supervillain in row one.
“Um, coincidence?”
“I was given reports after reports of weird disappearances and tragedies surrounding this Ivan. They describe him as often being in the company of a beautiful, tiny, redheaded woman with a distinctive pattern of freckles, but no pictures of her have ever been found.
Don’t you think that is odd?”
“Yes, this is a little odd, but Dad, what kind of conspiracy do you think this is?”
“He seems to be connected to powerful Asian families, families that probably don’t have their true history in the papers. Well, not just Asian crime families—Eastern European ones too. My hypothesis is that he’s some sort of facilitator between the Yakuza and the Russian Mafia and maybe other families to boot. Perhaps he’s the product of some crime family intermarriage that gives him connections to both sides. It’s the only thing that makes sense with my other theories . . .”
“So, are the aliens controlling our crime families with a breeding program?” Paige finally asked.
“Look at this one, Paige!” he said as he yanked out another clipping from one of his folders.
“Gail Filipovic?” she asked. “This is a missing persons report from the Revere, Massachusetts, police department. What does this have to do with a Japanese-Russian supervillain?”
