CHAPTER FORTY ONE
Jace drove into the woods. It was near Rickets’ house, were hundreds of acres were lost as the forest reclaimed their ownership of the ground. Everyone around Pedlam, Rawley, and the other communities all congregated at Rickets’ House, but no one ventured in the woods.
No one dared because a presence was felt and if you weren’t ready for it, it could bring about a terror that had never been experienced before.
Luckily, I’d grown used to them and when Jace parked the car, I got out to walk silently beside him as he led me further into the pine and coniferous maze.
The dusk was starting to settle. It lent a pink mist to the ground that seemingly materialized from the lowest branches to the grass tips.
It never arose above the trees and yet, it only hovered above the ground.
I still said nothing and trusted who I walked with.
Jace finally stopped, stared into the pink mist, and took a breath.
“Did you bring me out here to die?” I asked, a pathetic joke.
“No.” Jace answered truthfully. “But someone else did.”
I glanced, sharply, to him, but waited.
“There.” He nodded ahead.
I looked, squinted, and finally saw it. A lone cross made of rock lay on the ground. They hadn’t been placed together for the pattern, but instead gathered and melted together.
Moss, flowers, and grass grew around and above them. I doubted they’d moved since they’d been laid and probably rooted in place to the ground.
“What is this, Jace?” I asked, not calm and not trembling. I was just between.
“Her name was Kendra Ulkight. She died eleven years ago.”
“Who is she?”
“A druggie. An addict.”
“You knew her?”
“I buried her.” Jace answered instead. He crossed to kneel beside the grave. “She was a drunken mistake one night and she got pregnant.” He spoke to the flowers, almost lovingly, as he grazed his fingertips across them. “She didn’t tell me until afterwards, when I might’ve done something.”
I stood alone and in the shadows.
I asked, awed and horrified, “What happened to the baby?”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. And when he met my eyes, I knew that Jace had never told another soul of this, of his child, or this grave lost among the pink mist and soulful trees.
“Kendra and I hooked up. It went on for about six months, but she wanted drugs and I refused to keep supplying her. She left and told me that I’d regret it.” Jace sighed and sat now. He wrapped his arms loosely around his knees and only saw the cross made of stone.
I stood alone and in the shadows. My eyes open, watching, afraid.
“They stole the baby. Kendra came to me. She was bleeding. She was…” Jace swallowed tightly on the emotion. On the sadness of a loss that he’d never met. “She was high and threatening all kinds of things. She ranted how I should’ve loved her and taken care of her. She did what she threatened. She was going to make me regret cutting her off and then…she told me what they did.”
I fell to the ground, slowly, and knelt with my knees to the grass.
Jace added with a final surrendering breath, “Galverson’s men found her and promised her money and all the drugs that she’d want if she gave them the baby. She did it, eventually, and they gave her all the drugs she wanted. She came to me after awhile, after she snorted her way through all those drugs and after all her dealers cut her off. No one touched her. She always used my name, said they’d deal with me if they hurt her.”
No tears fell from his face. No emotion except the ones that are felt in the bone, so deep that they direct everything else.
“Galverson never knew. They never asked questions about the father. Kendra got around. It could’ve been anyone, but she told me that it was mine. She’d only been with me during that time and I believed her. She was obsessed with me. She’d show up at the club all the time, at the gang’s headquarters. If she wasn’t with me, Krein usually kept a watch on her for me.” He looked up, piercing me, “But he never touched her.”
“She was hallucinating when she got to me that night. She was riding high. The needle was still in her arm. The blood was everywhere, but she broke down and told me everything. They took my son. She never even got to hold him. She cried about that. I think she was more upset about that than actually letting them have him.”
“They stole him.” I said faintly. “He wasn’t given. He wasn’t sold. They stole him.”
“I know. You asked me a long time ago about the night I changed my mind. Well, it wasn’t that night when Kendra came to me. It was the next night. Kendra stayed at my place. She was…she was fine when I left. I had a big meeting to go to with Sal and I was still in shock over what she told me. But that night, when I got home, after seeing….Evan’s turn his back on his kid, I got home and Kendra had found another stash of drugs. She actually looked peaceful in the tub, with a fucking line sticking out of her arm, but her face was…content.”
“Jace.” I knelt closer to him. Just within touching distance.
He looked up, but he never saw me.
“She didn’t come to me for drugs. She wanted to die. She told her secret and she took the right amount to die. She wanted to die. I missed it.” He finished and his voice shook now. His hands rattled, but he took a deep breath and calmed them. He calmed his voice.
“It was that night when I decided to change my life. I buried her here that night. I didn’t want an investigation happening. Not that it would matter. Evans was still the Chief then. They would’ve hit a wall with her death and they’d just back off, like always. Sal got everyone to back off.”
Except him.
“I’m never going to find my son. I know that. He’s gone.” Jace saw me now. And promised, “It’d be a fucking miracle if I did find him, but it wasn’t right what they did. None of it’s right, but taking a kid—I lost my son. I thought—I killed Sal and I thought everyone was destroyed. He killed my baby brother. He took my son—”
He choked off and buried his nose against his shoulder. For just a moment.
“Kendra was one of yours.” Jace told me as he studied me intently. “She was a runaway. Her dad raped her every night. Can you blame someone for leaving that.”
It wasn’t a question, not to either of us.
The cross of stone laid still, never moving and never wavering as the grass must’ve wilted beside it, only to grow again. The stones stood there, enduring it all, every season, every storm.
“He’s going to take your nephew.” Jace spoke clearly. Succinct. He never skirted from the words. “I told you all this because you have to know what you might lose. What you will lose. He’s going to come for your nephew…”
I fell back and retracted my hand.
Jace caught it and gripped it tight. “He’s going to take Gray if we don’t get ahead.”
We couldn’t. I couldn’t lose either of them.
“But Munsinger…”
Jace said the harsh words. That was his job and he did his job, “He loved your nephew. He wanted to be a father for him. What do you think Munsinger would want? What do you think he’d do, if it meant him or his son?”
“Don’t…” I whimpered, unseeing, and all too hearing. “I can’t…”
“What do you want?” I asked, stricken.
Jace searched my face. A banked grief mirrored in his beautiful piercing grey eyes.
“You have to choose.” He said simply.
And I was reminded of an earlier dooming gloom. I was a child, told to sit still or my dolls would be destroyed. It wasn’t right to threaten a favored child’s toy. And yet, I knew, in the my bones, that it wasn’t right to be rooted and stilled.
I had to choose.
A child’s choice is never rational. It’s never analyzed. It’s only felt. A child knows what’s right or wrong. They see what we, as adults, cannot and they know which wrong was the more wrong.
I had to make the same choice, but I wasn’t a child and I wasn’t needing to choose between leaving unnatural confinements or my favorite toy that I loved with all my heart.
I shook my head, “We can grab Gray and we keep searching for Munsinger.”
Jace had been reaching for my hand, but pulled it away as he sat straight and remarked, still choked from his own past, “That phone call, before we came out here, that was a source I have in the DEA mainframe data analytical department. They found the safehouse and they’re ruling it…mission aborted.” He finished, dryly. “There’s too big of a body count and they can’t sanction anymore.”
I stood apart and watched myself as I stood in the dark, but never felt the sunlight.
“What does that mean?” I asked quietly.
“It means that we can either keep going or we can go back to our lives.”
I didn’t have a life after this.
I said nothing.
“If we keep going, and I am, it means that we might be alone.”
“What about your team?”
“They don’t have to help. They can leave and return for assigned duties or…they can stay, for a time. We all get some headway before we’re demanded back at Headquarters. All Deep Cuts are given time to finish their last mission or tie off any loose ends. So…”
“What are you saying, Jace?!” I exclaimed. “Just tell me.”
“I don’t have the manpower to guard Gray and keep looking for Munsinger. We have to move now.” He spelled it out, just like I’d told him too. And a part of me hated him for it. Another part of me curled in on itself and withered away from the world.
I stood alone, a me from me.
“So I have to choose…” I said faintly.
Jace didn’t say anything. And that was when, “You choosing for me, aren’t you? If I don’t say what you want me to say, you’re going to do it anyway?”
“He took my son.” Jace said in response. “I’m the father that still lives and I don’t know where my son is. So if I’d been given the choice, I know what I would’ve chosen and your friend had the same passion in his voice. I heard it, Maya.”
“He’s mine.” I whispered and curled away from him.
“They both are.” Jace told me.
“She wasn’t yours.” I looked to the cross.
“She would’ve been and she is now. I buried her as mine.” Jace cut out, drawn and tired. “She was the mother of my child. That means something.”
I was a child once.
And then I grew up the next day.
And I felt ancient, but I lashed out, angrily, “How dare you bring me out here, pull my strings, and then drop this bomb? How dare you!”
“Maya.”
I scrambled to my feet. “What? Do you want to manipulate me some more? Am I the conned right now?”
“This isn’t about who’s playing who.” Jace cried out. “This is about a war. You might lose your nephew. Do you want that to happen? Have you actually thought about it?”
“You’re asking me to choose.”
“Fine.” He clipped out. “I won’t give you the consideration to think it over. I’ll make the decision. Is that what you want? Do you want me to do the dirty work? Do you want to hate me because you couldn’t pay enough respect to your friend’s memory to know that he would’ve wanted you to make this choice.”
I felt slapped from his words.
“He’s a father.” Jace’s word overhauled me from their simplicity. “His job is to protect his child. That’s his most important job in the world. And he would’ve. I heard him enough, Maya, to know that he would’ve made the decision that you can’t.”
I gazed into the distance, but it wasn’t the trees that I saw. I saw a golden field and I saw a billowing white robe dance through the golden wheat. The child’s laughter rang to my ears then and I saw the white robe look back. It was the face of a golden child, of the golden girl that had haunted my dreams earlier.
She’d grown in age and beauty. And her eyes, still pewter, wanted to tell me something, but I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t hear her words because she really wasn’t there. She really didn’t exist. And the golden wheat field disappeared to be replaced by the sullen and overshadowing trees.
Jace stood before me, haunted and harsh.
“What can I say?” I asked.
And that’s when Jace saw my turmoil and when he enfolded me against him.
My hands uncurled against his chest, helpless, but not able to cling anymore.
I had no decision to make. It had already been decided and not at the hands of Jace.
So what was he asking of me? To readily condemn my friend and family to death or to allow some time before my soul came to terms with the sacrifice that had been forced upon me.
My nephew or my brother.
Krein was my brother in blood, but Munsinger was my brother in spirit.
He’d replaced Krein in more than one manner, but I hadn’t realized the roles until that moment, when his end came to haunt my doorstep.
It was a sullen and silent ride back.
When he parked again, returned with some coffee for me, I murmured, “He hated birds.”
“What?” Jace asked as he paused before starting the car again.
“Joe. His first name was Joe, but I called him…he hated birds. He thought they were useless, but he liked ostriches for some reason. I never understood that. Ostriches were useless. They don’t fly, what kind of bird are they?”
Jace’s fingers fell away from the keys in the engine. “He hated birds.” He repeated.
“Hmm mmm. And seals because they ate penguins, which, makes no sense because penguins are birds, but…”
“He hated birds.”
“Yeah.”
Jace watched me, and he saw what I didn’t want him to see.
“And he thought he was the next poet to write the American classic. He…saw life differently, not naively, but…as a dreamer. He had such dreams for everything.”
Jace sat beside me, quiet. Just there.
“He was going to get married, well—you know—but,” I chuckled. “He asked me when I was in New York before where to send the wedding invitation. He said he’d drop it off in Glory’s Basket.” I laughed now. “I didn’t even say anything. That was just like him to say he’d drop off my wedding invitation in Glory’s Basket. It’s just a myth. The place doesn’t even exist, but in Munsinger’s mind, he would’ve made it exist. I know it.”
“It exists.” Jace said quietly. “I’ve been there.”
“What?”
I held my breath, but said again, “What?”
“It exists.” Jace nodded and sipped his coffee.
Glory’s Basket was a supposed myth. A security vault for the homeless and runaways. It was a museum that had a labyrinth for a basement. It was too much of a maze to be used by the museum so it was left alone. It was rumored that anyone could seek sanctuary in this building and it would be honored, but there were rules that a person could only stay so long. Others would use it to hold their keepsakes. The basement was too confusing, no one dared venture in for a mere robbery of precious keepsakes. Like a wedding invitation for a wedding thought would never take place now.
I loved to hear about Glory’s Basket because it was a place of order, of mystical dreams, and rules that were adhered among a community who were supposedly soulless. Glory’s Basket stood against the grain and proclaimed that there was order, honor, and hope to better things.
But I never thought it existed. I only thought it was a story…
“Glory’s Basket exists.” I said faintly. And smiled. “He must’ve skipped all the way home that night.”
Jace glanced to me and knew I meant Munsinger.
A poet dreamer had found the motherload of his dreams. It seemed right that it had been Munsinger who had proven cynicism wrong.
“How do you know about it?”
Jace paused, but he answered, “It’s a meeting place for drug lieutenants.”
My smile was wiped clean.
“He hated birds though.” I commented again.
Jace drove us back to a lively kitchen with pizza boxes spread over the table and beer bottles, empty and full, on the counter.
Taryn had been laughing, but it died as she saw our faces.
I walked through and into the bedroom.
Later that night, after a shower and clean clothes, I curled on my side.
Jace had initially come in and stood by as I went about getting ready for bed, but after awhile, as I didn’t say another word, he moved back into the kitchen, complete with his papers and guns.
He was right. If given the choice, Munsinger would’ve said, without waiting a beat, that it should be him who’s taken to death’s door. Protect the child. That was a creed Munsinger would’ve lived by and had proved he did at the end.
I couldn’t grasp the risk of losing Gray. Not yet and I knew it was partially because I believed Jace. He wouldn’t let Marcus take Gray and so I knew that he wouldn’t.
I was readying myself for the acceptance of losing my brother. Not only of losing, but of turning my back on him and walking away.
Marcus would expect us to use time and search for him. He wouldn’t expect us to be ahead of him, already protecting his next target.
He had a theme for the last two books. God. Father. The Decoder and the Key. We found the Decoder and Jace believed that I could find the Key.
Marcus had been God with his Job protecting the Decoder.
Where would he have the Key? He was the Father. He was a father. He thought Munsinger was a father. He gave no other clue and yet, Munsinger was the clue.
He was the Father. Marcus was the Father.
“He has a picture of Ben in his sanctuary. He used to go in there everyday and pray to him, pray for him.”
I gasped and knew where the Key was.
The door opened and Jace stood in the doorway, concerned as he must’ve heard my gasp.
I sat up straight and told him, quietly, “I know where the book is.”
Jace closed the door and sat on the side of the bed.
I scooted closer, but didn’t touch him.
“He kept the first book in his bible, right? He’d keep it close to him, but it’d mean something and it wouldn’t be evident to everyone else where it was.”
Jace nodded. “He’d need it everyday. The Key has all his meetings. It’s his planner.”
I nodded, “He used to pray to Ben’s picture in his sanctuary everyday. Sometimes, he’d go in there a few times a day. The Key is in his Sanctuary, behind Ben’s picture.”
“Where he’s the Father in the Father’s sanctuary.”
I nodded. “That’s where the book is, if it’s anywhere. Our clue was Job before, that’s where he had the book and this time, the clue was just Father.”
Jace studied me and lifted a tender hand to skim down my hair, shoulder, arm, to end at the tips of my fingers. “I’m sorry about your friend. I really am.”
He’d lost his son, his brother, he’d pushed away the woman he loved, and now he was offering his condolences for my loss.
I sighed and scooted closer to wrap my arms and legs around him. I fit underneath his arm and buried my head in his chest as my legs found his waist.
Jace dropped a gentle kiss to my forehead and whispered again, “I’m really sorry, Maya.”
Yeah. I was too.
Jace drove into the woods. It was near Rickets’ house, were hundreds of acres were lost as the forest reclaimed their ownership of the ground. Everyone around Pedlam, Rawley, and the other communities all congregated at Rickets’ House, but no one ventured in the woods.
No one dared because a presence was felt and if you weren’t ready for it, it could bring about a terror that had never been experienced before.
Luckily, I’d grown used to them and when Jace parked the car, I got out to walk silently beside him as he led me further into the pine and coniferous maze.
The dusk was starting to settle. It lent a pink mist to the ground that seemingly materialized from the lowest branches to the grass tips.
It never arose above the trees and yet, it only hovered above the ground.
I still said nothing and trusted who I walked with.
Jace finally stopped, stared into the pink mist, and took a breath.
“Did you bring me out here to die?” I asked, a pathetic joke.
“No.” Jace answered truthfully. “But someone else did.”
I glanced, sharply, to him, but waited.
“There.” He nodded ahead.
I looked, squinted, and finally saw it. A lone cross made of rock lay on the ground. They hadn’t been placed together for the pattern, but instead gathered and melted together.
Moss, flowers, and grass grew around and above them. I doubted they’d moved since they’d been laid and probably rooted in place to the ground.
“What is this, Jace?” I asked, not calm and not trembling. I was just between.
“Her name was Kendra Ulkight. She died eleven years ago.”
“Who is she?”
“A druggie. An addict.”
“You knew her?”
“I buried her.” Jace answered instead. He crossed to kneel beside the grave. “She was a drunken mistake one night and she got pregnant.” He spoke to the flowers, almost lovingly, as he grazed his fingertips across them. “She didn’t tell me until afterwards, when I might’ve done something.”
I stood alone and in the shadows.
I asked, awed and horrified, “What happened to the baby?”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. And when he met my eyes, I knew that Jace had never told another soul of this, of his child, or this grave lost among the pink mist and soulful trees.
“Kendra and I hooked up. It went on for about six months, but she wanted drugs and I refused to keep supplying her. She left and told me that I’d regret it.” Jace sighed and sat now. He wrapped his arms loosely around his knees and only saw the cross made of stone.
I stood alone and in the shadows. My eyes open, watching, afraid.
“They stole the baby. Kendra came to me. She was bleeding. She was…” Jace swallowed tightly on the emotion. On the sadness of a loss that he’d never met. “She was high and threatening all kinds of things. She ranted how I should’ve loved her and taken care of her. She did what she threatened. She was going to make me regret cutting her off and then…she told me what they did.”
I fell to the ground, slowly, and knelt with my knees to the grass.
Jace added with a final surrendering breath, “Galverson’s men found her and promised her money and all the drugs that she’d want if she gave them the baby. She did it, eventually, and they gave her all the drugs she wanted. She came to me after awhile, after she snorted her way through all those drugs and after all her dealers cut her off. No one touched her. She always used my name, said they’d deal with me if they hurt her.”
No tears fell from his face. No emotion except the ones that are felt in the bone, so deep that they direct everything else.
“Galverson never knew. They never asked questions about the father. Kendra got around. It could’ve been anyone, but she told me that it was mine. She’d only been with me during that time and I believed her. She was obsessed with me. She’d show up at the club all the time, at the gang’s headquarters. If she wasn’t with me, Krein usually kept a watch on her for me.” He looked up, piercing me, “But he never touched her.”
“She was hallucinating when she got to me that night. She was riding high. The needle was still in her arm. The blood was everywhere, but she broke down and told me everything. They took my son. She never even got to hold him. She cried about that. I think she was more upset about that than actually letting them have him.”
“They stole him.” I said faintly. “He wasn’t given. He wasn’t sold. They stole him.”
“I know. You asked me a long time ago about the night I changed my mind. Well, it wasn’t that night when Kendra came to me. It was the next night. Kendra stayed at my place. She was…she was fine when I left. I had a big meeting to go to with Sal and I was still in shock over what she told me. But that night, when I got home, after seeing….Evan’s turn his back on his kid, I got home and Kendra had found another stash of drugs. She actually looked peaceful in the tub, with a fucking line sticking out of her arm, but her face was…content.”
“Jace.” I knelt closer to him. Just within touching distance.
He looked up, but he never saw me.
“She didn’t come to me for drugs. She wanted to die. She told her secret and she took the right amount to die. She wanted to die. I missed it.” He finished and his voice shook now. His hands rattled, but he took a deep breath and calmed them. He calmed his voice.
“It was that night when I decided to change my life. I buried her here that night. I didn’t want an investigation happening. Not that it would matter. Evans was still the Chief then. They would’ve hit a wall with her death and they’d just back off, like always. Sal got everyone to back off.”
Except him.
“I’m never going to find my son. I know that. He’s gone.” Jace saw me now. And promised, “It’d be a fucking miracle if I did find him, but it wasn’t right what they did. None of it’s right, but taking a kid—I lost my son. I thought—I killed Sal and I thought everyone was destroyed. He killed my baby brother. He took my son—”
He choked off and buried his nose against his shoulder. For just a moment.
“Kendra was one of yours.” Jace told me as he studied me intently. “She was a runaway. Her dad raped her every night. Can you blame someone for leaving that.”
It wasn’t a question, not to either of us.
The cross of stone laid still, never moving and never wavering as the grass must’ve wilted beside it, only to grow again. The stones stood there, enduring it all, every season, every storm.
“He’s going to take your nephew.” Jace spoke clearly. Succinct. He never skirted from the words. “I told you all this because you have to know what you might lose. What you will lose. He’s going to come for your nephew…”
I fell back and retracted my hand.
Jace caught it and gripped it tight. “He’s going to take Gray if we don’t get ahead.”
We couldn’t. I couldn’t lose either of them.
“But Munsinger…”
Jace said the harsh words. That was his job and he did his job, “He loved your nephew. He wanted to be a father for him. What do you think Munsinger would want? What do you think he’d do, if it meant him or his son?”
“Don’t…” I whimpered, unseeing, and all too hearing. “I can’t…”
“What do you want?” I asked, stricken.
Jace searched my face. A banked grief mirrored in his beautiful piercing grey eyes.
“You have to choose.” He said simply.
And I was reminded of an earlier dooming gloom. I was a child, told to sit still or my dolls would be destroyed. It wasn’t right to threaten a favored child’s toy. And yet, I knew, in the my bones, that it wasn’t right to be rooted and stilled.
I had to choose.
A child’s choice is never rational. It’s never analyzed. It’s only felt. A child knows what’s right or wrong. They see what we, as adults, cannot and they know which wrong was the more wrong.
I had to make the same choice, but I wasn’t a child and I wasn’t needing to choose between leaving unnatural confinements or my favorite toy that I loved with all my heart.
I shook my head, “We can grab Gray and we keep searching for Munsinger.”
Jace had been reaching for my hand, but pulled it away as he sat straight and remarked, still choked from his own past, “That phone call, before we came out here, that was a source I have in the DEA mainframe data analytical department. They found the safehouse and they’re ruling it…mission aborted.” He finished, dryly. “There’s too big of a body count and they can’t sanction anymore.”
I stood apart and watched myself as I stood in the dark, but never felt the sunlight.
“What does that mean?” I asked quietly.
“It means that we can either keep going or we can go back to our lives.”
I didn’t have a life after this.
I said nothing.
“If we keep going, and I am, it means that we might be alone.”
“What about your team?”
“They don’t have to help. They can leave and return for assigned duties or…they can stay, for a time. We all get some headway before we’re demanded back at Headquarters. All Deep Cuts are given time to finish their last mission or tie off any loose ends. So…”
“What are you saying, Jace?!” I exclaimed. “Just tell me.”
“I don’t have the manpower to guard Gray and keep looking for Munsinger. We have to move now.” He spelled it out, just like I’d told him too. And a part of me hated him for it. Another part of me curled in on itself and withered away from the world.
I stood alone, a me from me.
“So I have to choose…” I said faintly.
Jace didn’t say anything. And that was when, “You choosing for me, aren’t you? If I don’t say what you want me to say, you’re going to do it anyway?”
“He took my son.” Jace said in response. “I’m the father that still lives and I don’t know where my son is. So if I’d been given the choice, I know what I would’ve chosen and your friend had the same passion in his voice. I heard it, Maya.”
“He’s mine.” I whispered and curled away from him.
“They both are.” Jace told me.
“She wasn’t yours.” I looked to the cross.
“She would’ve been and she is now. I buried her as mine.” Jace cut out, drawn and tired. “She was the mother of my child. That means something.”
I was a child once.
And then I grew up the next day.
And I felt ancient, but I lashed out, angrily, “How dare you bring me out here, pull my strings, and then drop this bomb? How dare you!”
“Maya.”
I scrambled to my feet. “What? Do you want to manipulate me some more? Am I the conned right now?”
“This isn’t about who’s playing who.” Jace cried out. “This is about a war. You might lose your nephew. Do you want that to happen? Have you actually thought about it?”
“You’re asking me to choose.”
“Fine.” He clipped out. “I won’t give you the consideration to think it over. I’ll make the decision. Is that what you want? Do you want me to do the dirty work? Do you want to hate me because you couldn’t pay enough respect to your friend’s memory to know that he would’ve wanted you to make this choice.”
I felt slapped from his words.
“He’s a father.” Jace’s word overhauled me from their simplicity. “His job is to protect his child. That’s his most important job in the world. And he would’ve. I heard him enough, Maya, to know that he would’ve made the decision that you can’t.”
I gazed into the distance, but it wasn’t the trees that I saw. I saw a golden field and I saw a billowing white robe dance through the golden wheat. The child’s laughter rang to my ears then and I saw the white robe look back. It was the face of a golden child, of the golden girl that had haunted my dreams earlier.
She’d grown in age and beauty. And her eyes, still pewter, wanted to tell me something, but I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t hear her words because she really wasn’t there. She really didn’t exist. And the golden wheat field disappeared to be replaced by the sullen and overshadowing trees.
Jace stood before me, haunted and harsh.
“What can I say?” I asked.
And that’s when Jace saw my turmoil and when he enfolded me against him.
My hands uncurled against his chest, helpless, but not able to cling anymore.
I had no decision to make. It had already been decided and not at the hands of Jace.
So what was he asking of me? To readily condemn my friend and family to death or to allow some time before my soul came to terms with the sacrifice that had been forced upon me.
My nephew or my brother.
Krein was my brother in blood, but Munsinger was my brother in spirit.
He’d replaced Krein in more than one manner, but I hadn’t realized the roles until that moment, when his end came to haunt my doorstep.
It was a sullen and silent ride back.
When he parked again, returned with some coffee for me, I murmured, “He hated birds.”
“What?” Jace asked as he paused before starting the car again.
“Joe. His first name was Joe, but I called him…he hated birds. He thought they were useless, but he liked ostriches for some reason. I never understood that. Ostriches were useless. They don’t fly, what kind of bird are they?”
Jace’s fingers fell away from the keys in the engine. “He hated birds.” He repeated.
“Hmm mmm. And seals because they ate penguins, which, makes no sense because penguins are birds, but…”
“He hated birds.”
“Yeah.”
Jace watched me, and he saw what I didn’t want him to see.
“And he thought he was the next poet to write the American classic. He…saw life differently, not naively, but…as a dreamer. He had such dreams for everything.”
Jace sat beside me, quiet. Just there.
“He was going to get married, well—you know—but,” I chuckled. “He asked me when I was in New York before where to send the wedding invitation. He said he’d drop it off in Glory’s Basket.” I laughed now. “I didn’t even say anything. That was just like him to say he’d drop off my wedding invitation in Glory’s Basket. It’s just a myth. The place doesn’t even exist, but in Munsinger’s mind, he would’ve made it exist. I know it.”
“It exists.” Jace said quietly. “I’ve been there.”
“What?”
I held my breath, but said again, “What?”
“It exists.” Jace nodded and sipped his coffee.
Glory’s Basket was a supposed myth. A security vault for the homeless and runaways. It was a museum that had a labyrinth for a basement. It was too much of a maze to be used by the museum so it was left alone. It was rumored that anyone could seek sanctuary in this building and it would be honored, but there were rules that a person could only stay so long. Others would use it to hold their keepsakes. The basement was too confusing, no one dared venture in for a mere robbery of precious keepsakes. Like a wedding invitation for a wedding thought would never take place now.
I loved to hear about Glory’s Basket because it was a place of order, of mystical dreams, and rules that were adhered among a community who were supposedly soulless. Glory’s Basket stood against the grain and proclaimed that there was order, honor, and hope to better things.
But I never thought it existed. I only thought it was a story…
“Glory’s Basket exists.” I said faintly. And smiled. “He must’ve skipped all the way home that night.”
Jace glanced to me and knew I meant Munsinger.
A poet dreamer had found the motherload of his dreams. It seemed right that it had been Munsinger who had proven cynicism wrong.
“How do you know about it?”
Jace paused, but he answered, “It’s a meeting place for drug lieutenants.”
My smile was wiped clean.
“He hated birds though.” I commented again.
Jace drove us back to a lively kitchen with pizza boxes spread over the table and beer bottles, empty and full, on the counter.
Taryn had been laughing, but it died as she saw our faces.
I walked through and into the bedroom.
Later that night, after a shower and clean clothes, I curled on my side.
Jace had initially come in and stood by as I went about getting ready for bed, but after awhile, as I didn’t say another word, he moved back into the kitchen, complete with his papers and guns.
He was right. If given the choice, Munsinger would’ve said, without waiting a beat, that it should be him who’s taken to death’s door. Protect the child. That was a creed Munsinger would’ve lived by and had proved he did at the end.
I couldn’t grasp the risk of losing Gray. Not yet and I knew it was partially because I believed Jace. He wouldn’t let Marcus take Gray and so I knew that he wouldn’t.
I was readying myself for the acceptance of losing my brother. Not only of losing, but of turning my back on him and walking away.
Marcus would expect us to use time and search for him. He wouldn’t expect us to be ahead of him, already protecting his next target.
He had a theme for the last two books. God. Father. The Decoder and the Key. We found the Decoder and Jace believed that I could find the Key.
Marcus had been God with his Job protecting the Decoder.
Where would he have the Key? He was the Father. He was a father. He thought Munsinger was a father. He gave no other clue and yet, Munsinger was the clue.
He was the Father. Marcus was the Father.
“He has a picture of Ben in his sanctuary. He used to go in there everyday and pray to him, pray for him.”
I gasped and knew where the Key was.
The door opened and Jace stood in the doorway, concerned as he must’ve heard my gasp.
I sat up straight and told him, quietly, “I know where the book is.”
Jace closed the door and sat on the side of the bed.
I scooted closer, but didn’t touch him.
“He kept the first book in his bible, right? He’d keep it close to him, but it’d mean something and it wouldn’t be evident to everyone else where it was.”
Jace nodded. “He’d need it everyday. The Key has all his meetings. It’s his planner.”
I nodded, “He used to pray to Ben’s picture in his sanctuary everyday. Sometimes, he’d go in there a few times a day. The Key is in his Sanctuary, behind Ben’s picture.”
“Where he’s the Father in the Father’s sanctuary.”
I nodded. “That’s where the book is, if it’s anywhere. Our clue was Job before, that’s where he had the book and this time, the clue was just Father.”
Jace studied me and lifted a tender hand to skim down my hair, shoulder, arm, to end at the tips of my fingers. “I’m sorry about your friend. I really am.”
He’d lost his son, his brother, he’d pushed away the woman he loved, and now he was offering his condolences for my loss.
I sighed and scooted closer to wrap my arms and legs around him. I fit underneath his arm and buried my head in his chest as my legs found his waist.
Jace dropped a gentle kiss to my forehead and whispered again, “I’m really sorry, Maya.”
Yeah. I was too.