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An
excerpt from
coming in 2006 |
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“Please, sit down,” Julia said, waving Marissa and Jamie to seats before she crossed to her own chair. “Thank you for agreeing to see us,” Marissa said. “I’m sorry we interrupted you.” “It was nothing.” Julia welcomed the distraction. It let her heart level. It kept her from thinking about the look in Alex’s eyes. Instead, she studied the couple sitting across from her. For they were a couple, she would have known it before Marissa had said a thing. It wasn’t the clasped hands, but something that hummed between them, something that tied them as surely as a physical bond. She wouldn’t have put them together at a glance. Marissa looked too polished, too fiery for Jamie’s slightly rumpled, abstracted air. They seemed…glowing, somehow, though. Connected. Shrugging the thought aside, Julia folded her hands. “So,” she said briskly, “what have you got?” The two of them exchanged glances. Marissa moistened her lips. “I was just on vacation,” she began. “I wound up with something, and…” Ah, the dreaded vacation find, Julia thought in resignation, but then she realized there was a tension about Marissa, a strain in her liquid dark eyes that didn’t bespeak a flea market tchotchke. “And?” she prompted. “Look,” Jamie broke in. “How about if we don’t tell you anything about it. Just…look at it. Tell us what you think. Tell us if you think it’s real.” He looked at Marissa. “Okay?” She nodded and opened up the leather bag she wore strapped across her chest. Reaching inside, she brought out an object wrapped in cloth and laid it carefully on the desktop before unwrapping it. And Julia felt the unholy punch of excitement in her gut. This wasn't a vacation find brought in by some poor, deluded soul. This was the real thing. Where it had come from or how it had gotten there, she couldn't say, but she could sense the power of its age as though it were radiating waves of antiquity. It wasn't colored as so many of the pieces of that time were, and yet she was as certain as she was of her own name that it was ancient. Thin veins of gold chased around the carved ivory, an ivory so white despite the years that it seemed to glow somehow. It was shaped like a star with a hole through the center. Looking closer, she saw shallow etching, so faint and small as to be almost invisible, worn away, perhaps, by the years. Gods, designed to carry the bearer to the afterlife? Julia rummaged blindly in the desk drawer for the wooden box that held her loupe, unable to take her eyes off of the piece. Who had carved it long ago, sitting in some dusty desert workshop, never guessing that his handiwork would leap across centuries, millennia? What had it meant? What power had he believed it held? Slipping the loupe in place, she looked closer. Only to be astounded by the detail. The figures stood facing one another, hands clasped. A man, a woman, staring into each other's eyes. In each of their breasts, a tiny dot of embedded carnelian flamed red, seeming almost to pulse before her eyes. And the hairs prickled on the back of her neck. Not gods, lovers.
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