Delilah Lockhart (Mrs Vikram Ayyar) (dakini) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2008-07-14 01:28:00 |
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Current mood: | flirty |
Early Monday afternoon, 14 September 1942, at Delilah Lockhart Patil's house in Londinium...
Lilah Patil opened the door of her house almost before Jack had reached the stairs, looking once over each shoulder with a frown. “Hurry up!” she mouthed at him, looking directly at him from inside the dupatta she’d wound around her head and shoulders. “I think they’re watching my house again.” Once they were inside, she took off the dupatta and folded it, leaving it on the table where she kept the post until she was ready to look at it. She didn’t want Viresh’s bosses—or anyone else—reading her lips, or any other part of her face.
Jack did as he was told. “Who would be watching you?”
“Mysteries,” said Lilah, frowning. “I’d like to think Surya would tell me, but the truth is, she might not notice if some of the others are doing it. And I was called upon this morning, by someone named Reed who wanted to know if I know why Viresh hasn’t been in his office. Of course I told them the truth; he’s probably still in bed with that man of his.”
Jack laughed a little, then nodded, though that behaviour seemed rather outside the other descriptions he’d heard of Viresh. “Endymion mentioned the troubles he’s had with Mysteries. He seems to think he has some protection, but I know their type. That’ll only stop them if they think they’ll get caught.”
Lilah nodded. “They’re always worse when I’ve met with the Parkinsons or the Knights,” she said, shaking her hair off her shoulders as she closed and warded the door. “I spoke to Mrs Parkinson about something and worse luck, it was actually a waste of my time. The thing that I thought should disturb her actually pleased her.”
“I can see we have a lot to catch up on,” said Jack. “I’m not sure how much you’ve heard about what happened at the Manor, but her daughter turned up there this weekend. Seems Valeria Benedetto was actually Alessio Zabini’s niece. Lucky for them they found out before the wedding.”
Lilah relaxed visibly. “Good,” she said. “So someone did tell them.”
Jack raised his eyebrows at that. “Yes, well, it seems someone didn’t want them to be told. Apparently there was a curse laid on Portia that took out both her and the person who tried to remove it.”
Lilah frowned. “Damn her,” she muttered. “Charteris is bad enough but Lalage is the worst.”
“Charteris?” Jack glanced at her, hoping she’d realise she hadn’t mentioned him before.
“Michael Charteris,” said Lilah. “He helped Vikram out for a while, but he definitely has his own agenda. I don’t ever know quite what to think of him.”
Jack shook his head. “Just when I start thinking I know what’s going on, it gets even more complicated.”
“It’s all very complex,” said Lilah. “Vikram and I had a number of allies, and not all of them stayed with us.” There were a lot of things she might have said, but she still didn’t know Jack very well, and she’d already been investigated once because of her brother and the Crockfords. She wasn’t giving anyone else any reason to suspect her of treason. Whatever she and Vikram might have considered doing, they hadn’t done it, and Vikram had given his life to protect their work.
“After what I learned this weekend, I think I need allies,” said Jack. “Are you really certain that I should have similar talents to Valeria?” He didn’t really doubt that Lilah believed this, but he was still hoping that she’d made a mistake. Valeria was comfortable with her talent, but it unnerved Jack deeply.
“It’s a certainty,” said Lilah. “The readings are nearly identical.”
“I saw her cut herself and then heal almost before she started to bleed,” Jack said evenly, though thinking about it still made him want to shudder. “She said she’d survived an explosion that killed everyone else in the building. And then I find out that people who should’ve known better left me for dead, and I have to wonder just what happened to me.”
“They may have had good reason to believe you dead,” said Lilah; she’d said that before, but maybe it hadn’t sunk in. “Miss Benedetto worked in Italy as a member of a special force. I never knew before exactly what it is that she does, but this…makes sense. And it’s entirely possible that if you’d been ‘killed’ as often as she has, you would also heal just as quickly. These abilities, like any other, improve with use.”
“Once was quite enough, thanks,” Jack said, suppressing a grimace. “Valeria enjoys the practise, I don’t. But I suspect she hasn’t actually seen just how bad war can get.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Lilah, who would not soon forget her experiences in Italy and Switzerland. “She may not have seen the worst atrocities on the front, but she’s seen something, or she wouldn’t have left the Italians.”
“True,” said Jack. “There’s a difference between seeing it and being a victim, though, no matter how fast you heal.” He shook himself, changing the subject with an effort. Endymion would’ve done something distracting at this point, but Lilah wanted information; no-one here was going to save him from his own thoughts. “I really don’t want to talk about that. Do your records say anything about Valeria’s godfather, Nicolas de Marigny?”
Lilah nodded. She remembered de Marigny. “Oh, certainly—he lived with Alvaro Benedetto and his wife. He was an intensely private man, and Benedetto didn’t want him to talk to us, but I am sure that he was talented.”
“He was. Nicolas was my friend Bénédicte. Dracaena Malfoy confirmed it. I’d known her in the war too, under another name.” Jack laughed bitterly. “They’d thought I was dead…and I’d thought they were.”
“You knew Lady Malfoy? I knew her too, when she was a boy. But it’s been a long time.” Lilah put her hand on his arm, lightly. “But we must sit down, I’ll have chai brought out. This is not a story to tell standing up.”
Jack let her lead him to a sofa, trying to compose himself. So much had happened that he hadn’t really had time to think about it until now.
Lilah sat him down, then went into the kitchen herself after the chai, which she brought out a few minutes later on a brass tray in small cups. She pressed a warm cup into Jack’s hand, her expression worried.
“Thank you,” said Jack. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been able to talk about this to anyone. They’ve all had their own problems, except the young lady I took to the wedding, and I don’t think she’s very pleased with me right now.”
“Everyone does,” said Lilah. “But why would she not be pleased with you?” She sat on the couch facing Jack, curled up a little against it, and drank her chai, gathering her shawl around her shoulders even though it was rather warm.
“Partly because she had to work on what should’ve been a vacation, and partly because I was distracted by running into an old girlfriend, but mostly I think it was the realisation that the old girlfriend used to look after her when she was little,” said Jack ruefully. “It probably didn’t help that her brother’s boyfriend kept flirting with me. But that was to distract me from thinking about what Valeria could do, and what our enemies might want to do to us…like I said, complicated.”
Lilah sighed. Jack was the first person she’d had a non-professional sexual thought about since Vikram’s death…and he was not only still in love with someone who’d been missing from his life for more than twenty years, he was distracting himself with kids who hadn’t even been born at the time. “How old is this girl?”
Jack winced. “Eighteen, though I do have to keep reminding myself of it.”
Lilah bit her lip to keep from chuckling, because Jack was very obviously upset, but she was just a little annoyed and it was better to show amusement than irritation. “Are you attracted to eighteen-year-olds as a general rule? Because really…that’s rather too young for you, isn’t it?”
“Not generally, no, but I’m used to Hollywood where it’s far more common for someone to be twenty-five and act eighteen than the reverse,” Jack said, and grinned at her expression, because it really was amusing—if you didn’t happen to be the person caught up in it.
Lilah finally allowed herself to laugh. “Maybe she’s not for you,” she said, lightly, and rested her hand on Jack’s arm again. “Although that’s very hypocritical and self-serving of me, given that I married the father of a school friend…but I wasn’t eighteen when I did it.”
Jack smiled and put his hand on hers. “Neither of us expected anything more than a good time out of this.” It was typical of the relationships he’d had since Paris, now that he thought about it. “But I’m usually better about paying attention to the person I’m with.”
Lilah laughed. “I’m sure she is a very charming young girl.” She sipped her chai. “So. You knew the Lady Malfoy?”
Jack nodded. “Yes. We met in Paris, during the war. Her name was Marcella Dumont then, and she was working with Nicolas.”
“Was it a sort of triadic relationship, then?” Lilah asked, raising her eyebrow. “Was she the old girlfriend? I can see why an eighteen-year-old would find that daunting. But she is so in love with Secretary Zabini.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “And yes, she and Zabini are very much in love. I’m glad she’s happy, and I’d never do anything to interfere with that. I don’t think Susie was worried about that. I think it was more that she realised I’d known people who’d worked for her father before she was even born.”
Lilah nodded. “That would also bother most eighteen-year-olds.” She smiled. “Curiouser and curiouser. So do you know what Nicolas de Marigny did? Vikram and I were never told.” Alvaro Benedetto had kept the information about the subjects he’d cared about close to his chest. It had been wise, of course, but it had been frustrating.
Jack nodded. “He can become invisible. Dracaena thought it was a glamour at first, but he got so good at it that even she couldn’t see through it.”
“That’s a new one on me,” said Lilah after a long moment’s thought. “I wonder if it’s not some kind of variant on the telepathy-empathy scale. The people with the best developed, most practised variations of that particular talent…” She shook her head. “Well, I’ve only met the one, and she works for Charteris, but she creates four-dimensional illusions, and her chakra hypertrophies imply that she began as a telepath.”
“Interesting,” said Jack. “I don’t recall him ever doing anything unusual along those lines, but then I never even suspected he was a wizard.”
Lilah shrugged. “It’s just a theory.” She sighed. “It has to have been difficult for you to see her again, and to talk about this, after so many years.”
“Yes,” Jack agreed. “But at least now I know what happened to her. Nicolas…Valeria says he vanished a few years ago after an argument with her father. Given his talents, that may very well be literal. Or he could be truly dead this time. I wish I could just rush out and find him, but how do you look for an invisible man?”
Lilah’s eyes widened slightly. “I don’t know,” she said suddenly, trying hard to suppress a giggle. “You shouldn’t put it like that, if you don’t want me to laugh, I’m so sorry..”
Jack grinned. “Oh, I’m sure he’d find it amusing too. I can only imagine the sort of fun he had with a talent like that.”
“I bet!” said Lilah. “He seems very prone to that sort of situation. I mean, I never knew what Benedetto’s wife thought of him, but…”
“Oh?” Jack asked, eager for every bit of information he could get.
“Well, relationships between men, and relationships outside the family unit, were frowned upon among the Fascists…but I thought it was obvious that he and Benedetto were closer than they claimed to be,” said Lilah.
“Oh,” Jack repeated, with a flash of jealousy. He knew it wasn’t fair—they’d both thought the other dead, after all, and he’d had relationships of his own—but he couldn’t help it.
“You’re still in love with him,” said Lilah, very quietly.
“Yes,” Jack agreed.
“Maybe he is alive.” Lilah sighed; this was hopeless. But maybe not; of course he was still obsessed. There was no surety, no knowing, no…closure. “It’s possible to find out, I suppose. You could try hiring a medium. If he can’t be contacted in the world of the dead…perhaps he’s not there.”
“True,” said Jack. “At least I’d know, even if I still wouldn’t have any way to find him.”
Lilah nodded. “You should find out,” she said softly. “I hate it that Vikram is gone, but at least I know.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Jack. “And I’m sorry about your husband.”
Lilah tried to smile a little. “It’s difficult,” she said. “But at least I know a little of what it has got to be like.”
“More than a little,” said Jack. “It’s been a great help just having someone to talk to. I wish there was something I could do for you.” He meant that, he realised, far more seriously than he’d intended to mean it. He wasn’t sure, given how much she obviously still missed her husband, but he suspected she might be feeling the same way. He could admit to himself, now that he’d learned what had really happened after the war, that he’d shied away from getting too involved with anyone, afraid that they’d leave him…as Nicolas had.
Lilah grinned at him. “You listen to me. And you’re not Surya or Endymion or one of my girls,” she said. “That’s something, believe me. I can’t talk about this to Vikram’s daughter. Or a sixteen-year-old boy, no matter how grown-up he thinks he is.”
Jack laughed. “No. Especially not Endymion—any time I think something that upsets him, he starts flirting to distract me. Which I have to admit works, even though sixteen is definitely too young for me.”
“Endymion flirted even with Vikram,” Lilah said, laughing. “And with women, sometimes, although he would never have acted on that.”
“And with you?” Jack asked, smiling. “Can’t blame him, I’d do the same. Though in my case I would be intending to act on it.”
“Well, and you might find I’d go along with it, if the time and the place were right,” Lilah allowed, feeling pleasantly vindicated, “but unfortunately, I met Endymion when he was involved with my brother and sister.”
“He seems to be quite attached to Hadrian now. It was actually rather sweet.” Jack smiled. “But if the time and place are ever right for me, do let me know.”
Lilah chuckled. “Oh, he’s very attached to Hadrian.” She leaned over to refill Jack’s cup, letting him have a good few of her northern exposure. “I think you need to make things right with Miss Kyteler first; there have already been enough misunderstandings between me and her family,” she said with a wry smile. “Her father’s mistress and I had a long-running professional rivalry. Lavinia and I are getting along now on Endymion’s account, but the last thing she needs is for Susie to be telling her what an awful old cow I am for stealing her boyfriend.”
“Right,” said Jack, as a great many things became clear. “Then I’ll be sure to tell you when the time and place are right for me.”
“You do that,” said Lilah. “I’d like to teach you everything I said I would. I could do it on a very professional level, as I told you the last time you saw me…but I’d rather not be so professional.”
“No,” Jack said softly. “I don’t think I’d want to be so professional either.”
Lilah reached out and touched his cheek with her fingertip. “I haven’t really been interested in anyone for a very long time,” she admitted. “Let her down gently, I know you can do that. It’s not that there’s someone else in your life, it’s that she’s eighteen. We’ve been through a lot of similar, difficult things. No matter how smart and sophisticated she is, she won’t understand how you feel about Nicolas, or how I feel about Vikram.”
Jack took her hand and turned to place a light kiss on her palm. “I will. She’s a nice girl, and she deserves someone closer to her age.” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “Not someone who just acts like he is.”
Lilah grinned at him. “She won’t see it that way. But she deserves someone to make a few good dumb mistakes with. Every eighteen-year-old deserves the fun of making a few dumb mistakes with someone else who doesn’t know any better than she does.” She and Gaius Marvolo had made more than their share, but then, his parents would never have allowed them to marry, and she’d known that going in; at least she’d been left with enough to manage the house, and not just with Gilderoy.
“That she does,” Jack agreed, and let himself admire Lilah for a moment.
“Well,” said Lilah, “now you have something to look forward to. And so do I. But in the mean time, perhaps I’d better take some more notes on Miss Benedetto and Mr de Marigny. Were there any other talents mentioned?” She picked up a pad and prepared to take notes. Otherwise it would be much too tempting to progress directly to the tantric teaching. And she had a lot of mental preparation to do herself before she attempted it.
Jack shook his head. “No. Although Valeria did say that Alessio also has a chakra anomaly, but it moves around. I get the feeling Nicodemo would probably rather I not say anything about his brother, but Alvaro Benedetto already knows about him, so it’s hardly a secret.”
Lilah frowned. “It moves?” She’d never heard of such a thing. She’d observed a few cases where the strong flow through the most anomalous chakra had affected its neighbours, but never a case of the hypertrophy moving.
Jack shrugged. “That’s what she said. Neither of them have any idea what his talent is, if he even has one.”
“The Zabinis…” Lilah frowned. “Nobody ever got close to any of them. They were on the wrong side of the civil wars in Italy.” She laughed, then corrected herself: “As far as the Italians were concerned, anyway.”
“Of course,” Jack said, smiling.
“Does Nicodemo Zabini know you’re seeing me?” Lilah asked in a quiet voice.
“Yes,” said Jack. “That’s why I don’t think he’d want me to talk about his brother. He didn’t seem too impressed with the idea of people with special talents. Called it ‘nonsense’, if I recall correctly.”
Lilah smiled. Nothing new about that. “I’m amazed he’ll even talk to someone who talks to me.”
“We didn’t exactly talk all that much,” Jack said, with a smile that would not have looked out of place on Nicodemo. “I get the impression he was only tolerating me for Dracaena’s sake.”
Lilah sighed and touched his face again. “He was like that in Rome as well. I think he believes it’s not possible for anyone with an interest to be different from the Fascists, and Vikram and I didn’t really know what was going on out there, until a little before they killed him,” she said bitterly.
“What is going on out there?” Jack asked.
Lilah sighed. “You met Miss Benedetto. Didn’t she tell you? She was ‘a heroine of the people’.”
“Because of her chakra anomaly?” Jack frowned. “Is that what they would have had Alessio do? But that doesn’t explain why Mysteries is interested in us.”
“You’re not thinking, Jack,” said Lilah. “In Italy, they’re impressing people like you into government service. Mysteries tried at one point to shut down Vikram’s research, to suppress us. And we were involved with the Indian National Congress.” She sighed, and glanced down at her blank paper. “For a while,” she said softly, and hoped that it wasn’t a mistake, “we wondered if the enemies of our enemies mightn’t be our allies. But what we found in Italy was worse than anything here. And Mysteries probably wants the same thing.”
“I’m sure they do,” said Jack. “Endymion worked very hard to stop me thinking about what could be done to someone with a talent like mine. I guess I’m just not sure yet how all the pieces fit together. It seems like this has been going on since long before the war started…”
“Which war?” Lilah shrugged. “Jack, Britannia was up to its nose in the Spanish War long before this one. But this has been going on since the ‘twenties, easily.”
Jack frowned. “And Endymion says Mysteries wants us because we’re descended from Azazel. Or so he says.”
Lilah’s jaw dropped. “Endymion said what?” That story could have only come from one person, and Endymion had never taken her ravings too seriously.
“We are Nephilim, descended from Azazel, and so fall under Mysteries since they’re concerned with other worlds.” Jack shrugged. “He and Hadrian seem convinced of it, and apparently so are Mysteries. At this point…I don’t know what to believe.”
Lilah made a face. “My little sister, who was a friend of Endymion’s, was involved with…demonology. But surely they know better than to believe what she told them.”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them. But it does make things more complicated,” said Jack. He glanced down at his hands. He didn’t want to believe it. But there were lots of people who would.
“You believe it, don’t you?” Lilah frowned. “You say you don’t know what to believe, but you’re afraid not to believe it.”
“It could be true, I don’t know,” said Jack. “I’m more worried about what other people might do, if they believe it.”
“People are going to believe things like that, anyway,” said Lilah with a shrug. “They always do. Muggles believe things like that about wizards and witches, or did, until they stopped. People in India, some of them believed hideous things about the Tantrikas…”
Jack nodded. “I suppose you’re right. Mysteries would want us no matter where our talents came from, and they aren’t the only ones. The only good thing in all of this is that there are very few people who know I’m one of them.”
“You mean, the only good thing for you,” said Lilah pointedly.
“Yes, of course,” Jack agreed, realising how what he’d said sounded. He’d been thinking more of the fact he was the only one of the group not known to be under Dracaena’s protection. “Though if I had a talent like Nicolas’ talent, it could be good for the rest of us too. But mine is really only good if I’m captured, and that’s something I’d like to avoid.”
“I’d prefer that you avoid it myself,” Lilah agreed readily.
“So other than Mysteries and foreign agents, is there anyone else I should be keeping an eye on while they still don’t know about me?” Jack wondered aloud.
Lilah thought about this for a minute. “They’re going to know about you soon enough anyway. Guilt by association.”
Jack shook his head. “They’ll know I’m interested in the subject, but they won’t know why. I think I can avoid doing anything suspicious; after all, I didn’t even know I had the talent until you told me.”
Lilah shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”
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