striding toward me. The crowd seemed to part for him, as if instinctively sensing his importance. He looked good, tall and fit and collected. It didn’t hurt that his eyes brightened just for me.
He could be a bad guy, my head warned me.
Or he might not, insisted my heart. Not Lex.
“This is a surprise.” Lex slowed as he reached me. Even after years with him, I wasn’t sure.
And I still had a plane to catch.
When I started walking again, reluctantly taking advantage of the clear space around him, he paced me.
“Are you all right?” he asked politely.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
He didn’t quite shrug, but it was implied. “Because your apartment got broken into last night?”
Oh, yeah. That. “I’m fine. How are you?”
He ignored my formality. “I regret how I behaved.”
The kiss? Or the argument? “Oh…”
“That’s one reason I’ve missed you so badly this last year. You’ve always been my touchstone.”
“So your own moral compass is still on the blink, huh?”
That wrung a hint of a smile from him. “I only mean to say, you were already having a stressful night. Please accept my apology for complicating matters.”
Proper and polite to the end. But I’d helped, with the argument and the kiss both. Fair was fair. “Apology accepted.”
Except that we were approaching my gate—and he was slowing down too. Just out of courtesy, right? To see me off? Except—
He drew a boarding pass from his jacket pocket. “You’re going to Paris, too? I’m guessing you’re in coach.”
I stared. I wasn’t ready for proof that my suspicions were warranted. But this couldn’t be coincidence…could it?
What the hell. “Have you ever heard the name Melusine?”
He glanced toward the gate, making sure we had time. “Isn’t she some kind of medieval mermaid?”
My heart flinched. He had heard of her!
“You mentioned her in your report on the women of Camelot, in the seventh grade,” he continued easily; if he was covering his guilt, he was really, really good. “You compared her to the Lady of the Lake, right?”
“You remember that?”
“We did work on it together, Mag.” We’d split the workload by gender. His report on the men of Camelot had lingered on the subject of the Holy Grail. He’d compared an Irish legend, Nuada of the Silver Hand, to the Fisher King of the classic grail quest.
“There weren’t a lot of high points to the seventh grade,” Lex said, sounding heartfelt. “But you were one of them. Let me upgrade your seat to first class, and you can tell me all about Melusine and your research and your trip—”
“No.” I hated the suspicion that kept me from saying yes. Foolish or not, I still liked him…or more.
But he wasn’t just a Stuart. He was a Stuart on my flight, feeling me out about my research.
Did he have to pull a gun on me before I learned caution?
“I’ll use my frequent-flyer miles,” Lex offered, pushing it. “You know how many of those I rack up.”
I shook my head, hesitation hard in my throat.
“For God’s sake, Mag, I’m not trying to buy you.”
A gate agent announced that they were boarding first-class passengers and passengers in need of assistance. I was neither. “Enjoy your flight, Lex.”
His eyes narrowed, suddenly dangerous. “I don’t know what’s happened to you this last year, Maggi, or what kind of crowd you’ve gotten involved with. But whatever and whoever it is, it sure isn’t an improvement.”
At my resolute silence, Lex turned away and offered his boarding pass to the gate agent. Maybe ten minutes later my section was called, and I boarded with the other peons, carefully not looking at him…
Just enough of a glance to tell that he, comfortably settled in an oversize leather seat with a cocktail in his hand, wasn’t looking at me, either. The seat beside him was empty, spacious and inviting.
I continued past, found my seat and manhandled my backpack into an overhead compartment, glad for an excuse to vent my frustration. I slid into a middle seat, between a large businessman and a teenager bobbing to his Discman.
I dug my cell phone out of my purse to turn it off.
One missed call, it read.
I thumbed a button and read my aunt Bridge’s mobile number. The screen then read, 1 new voice message.
While other passengers boarded, I retrieved the message.
“Lilith says you’re coming here,” my aunt Bridge wheezed, weak from more than her years as a smoker. Much of my frustration melted under my gratitude that she was even conscious. “I thought you would. My assistant will meet your flight. Be careful, chou. It may be worse than we feared.”
That was it? I checked the display, to make sure I still had a signal. I used the code to replay the message.
That was it.
“Miss?” It was the flight attendant. “We ask that you turn off all electronic devices during takeoff, and keep your cell phone off for the duration of the flight.”
I switched my phone off while she turned her attention to my neighbor’s Discman. Then, before stowing my purse beneath the seat in front of me, I exchanged the phone for the one set of notes that nobody had gotten—because they were handwritten.
And because I’d had them on me—a pile of scribble-filled index cards wrapped in a rubber band—the whole time.
“Melusine,” I read, ignoring the flight attendant’s safety presentation. “Goddess of Betrayal.”
The plane taxied awkwardly, like an albatross, back from the gate.
I read right through take-off, searching for something. Anything. Had someone stolen mine and Brigitte’s notes just to learn about Melusine? Or was it more likely that they hoped to find her grail, like with the recently destroyed Kali Cup? If so, they wouldn’t find the most useful clues in our notes. Writing down the rhyme we’d been taught as children would seem as silly as writing down the words to “Little Miss Muffet.”
“Three fair figures,” the rhyme starts. “Side by side…”
No, I didn’t need my notes for that. Nor did I need them to understand how Melusine had gone from goddess to fairy tale. Few things just vanish, after all.
But how she could also have changed from a kick-ass symbol of female empowerment to a woman whose man had done her wrong…. That made less sense. Frustrated, I put my seat back and closed my eyes, meditating on it…accessing my Grail Keeper knowledge, passed down mother to daughter for centuries.
Mom had told me the Melusine story from my infancy. Grand-mère and Aunt Bridge had elaborated on it as my cousin Lil and I got older, adding some of the naughty parts.
“Once upon a time…”
The basic story is this. Melusine was a fairy of such beauty that, when a French count came across her bathing in the river, he fell instantly in love. But she’d been cursed with a secret, so she would only marry the count if he agreed to leave her alone, every Saturday night, and never ask about it. He gladly agreed.
They married. She magically built whole castles for him overnight, and they had ten children. Legends vary on the family that resulted—the Lusignans of southern France are the top