the longing for a child that she and her husband had never been able to have. He watched her loving hands as they laid the six-month-old boy down her fingers tender as she caressed the wiggling body, deft as she kept the pins from sticking soft flesh, and playful as she tapped Rupert’s nose and cooed at him.
He let out a quiet sigh. Had his own mother been so loving? Had she protected him from pain and exposure? How many years did she weep for her lost son? Did she die in grief, never able to break free from the pain of a mother’s empty arms?
After four thousand years, only a shadow of his mother’s image remained. Still, this childless woman’s care for orphaned babies brought a familiar warmth, something he longed for that had gone wanting for too many centuries. Even her eyes somehow seemed familiar, like those of a friendly stranger who had smiled for no reason and then walked away, disappearing into the passage of time.
Mrs. Nathanson patted his hand. “Don’t worry about checking the escape tunnels tonight. I don’t think it will rain, so they should stay dry.”
“I’ll check them anyway. I’m trying to memorize all the paths in the maze.”
She gazed toward the ceiling, and her voice changed to a dreamy whisper. “I memorized them a long time ago. It’s fun to explore.”
“You memorized all of them? Why? They’re only for emergencies.”
“I sort of feel at home down there. It’s so peaceful.” She shook her head as if casting off her dream, but she kept her smile. “You’d better hurry to the meeting now. Patrick will want to begin on time.”
“Oh, yeah. Right!” Elam bolted toward the door. “Thank you!”
“Dress warm!”
“I will!” He grabbed a sweater from the back of a chair and rocketed from the room, sprinting down a long, high corridor as he slid his arms into the sweater’s sleeves. Although the mansion seemed designed by a stuffy aristocrat, with marble floors, brass doorknobs, and sculpted columns, neither the master of the house nor his wife would ever scold him for his mad dash down a hallway. After all, with about sixty orphans of various ages, shapes, and sizes living in a human beehive, the house always seemed abuzz with activity. No one would take notice of a multi-thousand-year-old teenager breezing by.
Elam slowed and turned down another corridor, a narrower one with a low ceiling and rough walls. Grabbing a lantern and a matchbook from a shelf along the way, he stopped at an entry to a dark hall. A heavy oak door, usually closed and locked, stood open, probably in anticipation of his arrival.
Striking a match, he touched the flame to the lantern’s wick. The fire crawled across the braided cotton and leaped upward into the glass chimney, giving rise to a beautiful image in his mind Sapphira Adi, her white hair igniting and the flames spreading down her lithe body just before she brought Acacia back to life. Though tears filled his eyes, he smiled. He would find her again someday . . . somehow.
He stepped through the doorway into another corridor. Its ceiling was so low, he instinctively ducked, though he knew he could stand erect without scraping his scalp. A few of the ceiling’s ancient, wooden beams bent toward the floor, and a musty odor hung in the dank air.
The corridor ended at another open doorway that led to a much larger room. He soft-stepped in and found Patrick seated where he expected him to be, in one of seven chairs at a round table set precisely over a circular compass etched into the floor. Two lanterns sat on the table, their wicks burning brightly.
As Patrick tapped his finger on a scroll he had rolled out in front of him, a cold pocket of air filtered through a ragged-edged rectangle in the stone ceiling high above. Several large ravens fluttered from one side of the opening to the other, apparently longing for the relative warmth of the humans’ abode.
Bathed in the eerie glow of moonlight, Patrick buttoned his thick gray sweater, then brushed his hand through his short reddish brown hair. A shadow, stenciled on a green curtain covering a ten-foot-by-ten-foot section of the wall, mimicked his actions.
After blowing out his lantern, Elam approached the table. “I am here, as you requested.”
Patrick rolled up his scroll and motioned toward the chair next to him. “Please sit. We have a lot to talk about.”