Legend of the Sorcerer (2 page)

The clerk frowned suspiciously. “We just print them. If it’s about kids or something, we call the cops, but otherwise Sherrill just tells us to shut up and deliver them. Listen, it’s time for me to close up. Do you want a refund or a free roll of film?”

“I want you to check the pictures you have here and see if any of them are mine.”

Elvira’s heavily lined eyes widened. “But that would take, like, forever.”

“They might still be here in someone else’s envelope. I’m in one shot, so you’ll know if you see them.”

The clerk slid off her stool and did a half-hearted scan. “Must have been picked up.”

Jordy didn’t want to just leave the photos, but with her pictures already gone, an easy switch was no longer an option. “I’ll be here through tomorrow.” She wrote her name and hotel on a blank film envelope. “Call me immediately if they come back in.”

She left the store feeling defeated. She glanced through the glass storefront as she kicked her car into gear and jammed it immediately back into park. Elvira had just tossed what looked like her envelope of photos into the trash.

Jordy strode back in. “What did you just throw away?”

The girl looked taken aback. “There were no negatives. They’re probably with the other pictures.” She shrugged. “They’ll just get a new set made.”

Jordy hated to admit she had a point, but she wasn’t going to pin her hopes on that. She stepped around the end of the counter and fished them out of the trash. “If she comes back with my pictures and wants these, give her my name and the name of my hotel.” She glared at the clerk. “
I’ll
make sure she gets them.”

M
alacai L’Baan answered his fan mail. Grudgingly.

It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the readers who enjoyed his work and took the time to write to him. He loved reading his mail. But couldn’t they just be happy reading, or even criticizing, his books? Why the fascination with him personally? He had to be the most boring guy on the planet. He spent most of his time living inside his head, creating his otherworldly stories, and the rest of his time dealing with Alfred.

Responding to fans was an arduous task. He never knew what to say and some of his readers’ letters were amazingly … graphic. Then again, not responding at all was out of the question.

Alfred, as he so often reminded him, had answered every fan letter he’d ever received, in his own hand. And as the legend he’d become, those letters had been innumerable. His grandson would do no less, even if his handwriting was so much worse.

E-mail had made part of the task easier. Alfred grumbled about the impersonality of it, but as far as Cai was concerned, it was a Very Good Thing. Or it usually was.

Cai frowned as the row of incoming mail scrolled onto his screen. The name was there again.

Margaron. Cai well remembered the spell it had triggered when Alfred had seen the last note. When Alfred went into full rant mode, even Cai couldn’t understand the old Welshman’s language, but Cai managed to piece together that Margaron was a Welsh name meaning pearl.

He noted the rest of the e-mail address. It was a different provider, but, like the others, it had originated somewhere in the UK. He had fans all over the world, so the location wasn’t unusual. It was the tone of the notes that bothered him.

Both of Margaron’s previous notes had referenced his new fantasy series,
The Quest for the Dark Pearl
. Part One had been on sale for a little over a week when the first note arrived. He’d responded with the standard thank-you e-mail he used when he deemed the correspondent to be a bit over the edge. Polite, but not inviting further conversation.

The second note had been terse, more emotional, not exactly threatening, but definitely out there. He’d opted to not respond at all, hoping she’d go on to other pursuits. She had rambled on about how the release of
Dark Pearl
had finally proven to her that he was the man meant to guide her future, and that together they were destined for immortal greatness. That had been unnerving, to say the least. But this time she’d gone much farther—and in a very different way.

He read,
Did you pick up the pictures as I instructed? She was quite lovely. Such a pity you didn’t respond to my last missive. Perhaps you need the challenge of a good deed, a soul rescued. Yes, I see now that I was wrong in underestimating you
.

I have her here. She loves your work, but she’s far from alone, isn’t she? Ah, they fantasize about the man who writes of such a powerful and seductive sorcerer. But she sees only the fantasy you
created. I understand the reality. You
are
the sorcerer. I have always known this, I alone believed. I have been waiting for your sign and you have finally given it to me
.

Bring me the Dark Pearl, Malacai L’Baan. Surely you don’t want her to suffer for her foolish mortal emotions. Bring me the Dark Pearl and she will be set free. And we will begin our future as ordained
.

Had some deranged soul out there actually kidnapped one of his readers? It seemed too ludicrous to even consider. He’d never received any pictures. What was she talking about? He scanned the last two notes she’d sent. Neither spoke of pictures or said anything about abducting anyone. He closed the file and leaned back in his chair with a deep, aggravated sigh.

The Dark Pearl series had been inspired by some vaguely remembered stories Alfred had told him as a child. Cai’s version was entirely fictional, a fantasy involving a magical dark pearl that his sorcerer hero had already spent some eight hundred pages searching for, and wouldn’t find until at least book four, if Cai stuck to his outline.

Alfred chose that moment to burst into the office.

“Dilys is heading over to Mangrove to do the marketing. Are you in need of anything?”

Yeah, an e-mail filter, he thought. Cai was careful not to look at his monitor. Alfred might be in his eighties and missing more than a few pages from his mental encyclopedia, but at times he was very well indexed. Always, it seemed, when Cai didn’t want him to be. “Can’t think of anything.”

His grandfather filled the doorway, though his demanding presence was more charisma than physical mass. He was tall, though less so over the past years. He depended more and more on his cane, but his wiry frame and squared, knobby shoulders kept his bearing erect, and there was an odd grace to his stilted gait. His hair was pure
white and fell to his shoulders in a silvery mane. His goatee and mustache created the look of an Old World scholar and storyteller. Alfred was both.

His color was good today, Cai noted, not as flushed as it had been yesterday. And he hadn’t garroted himself shaving. Always a blessing. Cai and Alfred had a longstanding disagreement over the latter’s use of a straight razor. It was a battle that, as of yet, Cai hadn’t managed to win. A neck undotted with bandages and Kleenex blots was a good sign, but it was the eyes that were the true gauge. They were as clear a turquoise blue as the water that surrounded their home on Crystal Key.

He’d have to be on his toes. No way was Alfred seeing the e-mail. Not after what had happened last time.

“Any good reviews in today’s mail?”

“Just fans and the occasional advertisement.”

For the most part, Alfred left Cai alone to his work, because he felt that what was in a man’s heart and soul was his to transform to the written word alone. But he did enjoy the critical reviews. Cai had caught him snooping through his mail more than once. As any proud grandparent would, he’d say when caught. But Cai knew differently.

Alfred had had a long, and at times outspoken, history with various literary reviewers such as Isolde Morgan. His public battles with her were notorious, and they had cleverly engendered only further review and attention to his work. But while Alfred was still widely considered the definitive Arthurian scholar of the modern era, he’d chosen not to publish anything in the last ten years. He’d said all he had to, was his reasoning for retiring. But Cai knew it was his failing mental faculties that had forced him to end his career.

Alfred had adjusted surprisingly well to his retirement. Of course, it helped that he still spent hours a day holed up
writing. He told Cai they were his memoirs and he’d let him in on them when he was good and ready.

Alfred’s eyes sparkled. “Any more mail from that Candy’s Playhouse website?”

Cai scowled. “No.” For a man who resented most things modern, Alfred had taken a perverse shine to certain aspects of the Internet that Cai would just as soon he not know about. “I delete that stuff.”

“Of course, but before or after you peruse them?”

“Very funny.”

“Just trying to improve your social life.” Alfred stepped into the room and Cai shifted to block his computer screen. Alfred’s eyesight would do a buzzard proud.

“Trust me, I’ll never be that desperate for companionship.”

Alfred looked down his narrow nose. “It
has
been a while.”

“Why don’t we leave that dead horse in the grave today, okay?” When Alfred merely nodded in too-easy acceptance, Cai frowned. “Okay, what’s up? When you give me that look I know you’ve got something up your sleeve.”

“I have nothing in my sleeves but my arms.” Alfred sniffed indignantly as only a Welshman could.

“Fine. But if Dilys comes home with anything more than boxes of groceries, we’re going to have another little chat about blind dates. Understand?” He remembered the blonde lifeguard who’d mysteriously popped up one day during his morning swim to “save him.” Alfred had looked so innocent, but Cai hadn’t missed the startling resemblance the woman had to Pamela Anderson Lee, nor had he forgotten Alfred’s recent fixation with
Baywatch
. Of late, he’d become quite engaged by
Xena, Warrior Princess
. Cai shuddered at the possibilities.

Alfred picked imaginary lint off his pristine white duck shorts saying, “I have had no dealings with Dilys in regards
to your dismal social calendar, dear boy.” Leaning on his gold griffin-headed cane, Alfred lowered himself to the seat in the corner and elegantly crossed his legs. “Now, why don’t we dispense with all this diversionary verbal byplay and you tell me what it is that has you upset. Is it a bad review?”

Cai thought about going with that, but Alfred knew he was rarely put out by negative reviews. “No, nothing like that.”

“Eileen?” Alfred said, referring to Cai’s editor. “She’s not tampering with that bit about the dragon in Book Two, is she? She needs to trust your inner voice.” There was only one thing that got Alfred’s back up besides “sadly misinformed literary analysts” and that was “frustrated wanna-be writers”—otherwise known as editors.

Cai raised a hand, even as Alfred’s gaze shifted to his computer screen. “No, she bagged that revision once I explained how it wouldn’t fit in.”

“Well, if she’d half a brain in her narrow-minded head, she’d have never questioned—”

“Don’t pick on Eileen, you like her, remember?”

“Yes, I do. What is the problem then if it is not the lovely Eileen? Nice Irish lass. A pity she’s married. Children, too.”

Cai merely tightened his smile. “The only I thing I lust after is her editorial skills.” He needed to contact her, he thought, and very possibly the local police. Was someone out there right now, torturing one of his readers? It seemed more fictional than real. But one look at any daily paper proved reality was often stranger than fiction. He just didn’t need this wacko to be his reality.

“Well, lust in one’s work is always a worthy thing, lad, but you mustn’t ignore your more earthly needs. A man can’t live in his mind alone. It stunts the imagination,
disconnects one from the emotions necessary to bring the words alive on the page.”

Cai sighed, knowing he was in for one of Alfred’s lengthier speeches on the sins of ignoring the flesh. He didn’t need this reality, either. He glanced at the screen, but turned his attention back to Alfred. One problem at a time.

It was often the only way he managed to get through the day.

J
ordy sipped her morning coffee and stared out over the water wafting through the mangroves. Maybe she could do her own investigation and find the woman in the pictures. “Yeah, right,” she murmured. Joe Friday she was not.