Gloria didn’t answer. Instead, she just smiled her lopsided smile and held out a hand. “Come on, honey,” she said in a soft, sibilant tone, “come and join with me this night. I want you.”
Jak took her hand without a word and followed her back to her tent. Once inside, she turned to kiss him, and he felt a charge run through him as their lips met, a feeling like stepping off into the void of infinity. It had been a long time for him, and it had taken someone like Gloria to awaken those instincts within him once more.
DEAN HAD AWAKENED when Jak had moved in the tent and watched Jak and Gloria leave. He also saw something that they missed: the figure of the blond armorer, limping heavily, lurking in the shadows of the tents. Remembering what Jon and Petor had told him, and figuring that being bedded by her sister would add to Margia’s hatred, he decided that he had to put his father in the picture as soon as morning came.
Things could get very difficult, if Margia wanted it that way…
Chapter Nine
They sat around the fire, the entire tribe gathered together—apart from those who were on watch—joined by Ryan and the companions. They sat in the flicker of the dying flames to hear Gloria as she spoke in a resonant and singsong voice, relating the stories that were passed orally from generation to generation of Amazon queens.
“At the time before the great darkness, they came in droves to tell of the secret gateways that were around the country. They were all, in their manner, defectors from the path of darkness who wanted to come into the light. They mapped the path for us, us who would be the inheritors and who would have the chance to right all wrongs and build once again.
“But there were those who would be against us and would seek to maintain the old ways. They would be illuminated under the moon of dark and would stay that way for many generations before coming once more into the newborn light.
“And yet still they would be shadow, for they would shadow the old ways in both the figure and the literal. And this would be the way that we could find them…”
Silence descended. All that could be heard was the deep, rasping breath of the Gate queen as she started to surface from her trance. The rasp diminished as her breath became more regular and she neared the surface of her consciousness.
No one spoke until Gloria had blinked several times, the faraway gleam in her eye being replaced by a sudden awareness and wonder of her surroundings. She always felt the same when emerging from a trance, telling Jak that it was like waking from a dream but not having slept, and seeing the world for the first time.
Now it was safe, Doc spoke. “I find your tales from within the trance most interesting, my dear. Allegory and fantasy to hide the truth from those on the outside and keep it within the chosen few.”
“But we’re the ‘chosen few,’ as you put it, sweets, and we don’t know what it means.”
Doc smiled slowly. “That’s because you’ve lost the key to the puzzle somewhere along the way. That’s something I would reckon whoever devised the legend never foresaw. But I believe it means that the thing we seek is somewhere to the northwest of what we used to call the United States, back in the days when there was an innocence in the air.”
“Everything seems to point that way, so that’s nothing new,” J.B. said, puzzled. What was it that made Doc so certain?
The old man seemed to sense the unspoken question. “My dear John Barrymore, I have not just plucked it out of thin air. I base my assumption partly on that which is already known, and partly on what we have just heard.”
“What part?” Dean scoffed. “C’mon, Doc, you can’t tell me that you got anything out of that.”
“On the contrary, my dear young Cawdor, I obtained plenty of information from the lovely Gloria to support my assumption. For instance, she spoke of the Illuminated Ones, whom we already know—of them being illuminated in a manner that suggests they stay underground, something that we already know. Perhaps more importantly, she spoke of them being a shadow to the old ways, in both a literal and figurative sense.” Doc paused like a ham actor, for effect.