By The Pricking of My Thumbs: Chapter 5/5 (Complete)
My most sincere thanks to my beta, darandkerry for her patience and attention to detail. Love ya, Tex-Ass!
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Leena’s Bed and Breakfast, Univille, South Dakota
The sound of Helena’s footsteps faded away, a farewell sentence punctuated by the slamming of the front door. “Helena!” Myka called after her desperately.
Myka struggled into a seated position, awkwardly swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. With a tremendous effort, she rose and attempted to walk, only to stumble with the first step.
“Whoa! Myka!” Claudia cried out, unable to reach the older woman from the opposite side of the bed. Only Pete’s swift movement saved Myka from crumpling to the floor. She sagged bonelessly against him as he guided her back to the bed.
“Steady, partner,” he reassured, helping her to slide back into a semi-recumbent pose against the pillows. “You’ve been completely out for a couple days now. Take it easy.”
“I need to find Helena,” Myka asserted, shaking her head slowly back and forth in an attempt to clear away the remaining vestiges of her artifact induced slumber. It felt like cleaning out a corner of the attic at her parents’ house, cobwebs clinging to her hands, as a feeling of panic overtook her. “I need to talk to her.”
“You need to lie still,” Artie said roughly. “You came dangerously close to dying, Myka. The last thing you need to be doing is traipsing around chasing after Miss Wells.”
“Artie,” Myka protested, running her hand distractedly through her hair, her bottom lip caught between straight white teeth, “I just told everyone that she tried to destroy the world. You saw her face, Artie. She was devastated. I have to explain…I have to try and make sense of it.”
“Speaking of making sense, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened in your dream,” Artie replied, maneuvering the conversation away from the annoying H.G. Wells. “You said something about Warehouse 2 and the Minoan trident, two things I had no idea you knew anything about, so I would be very interested in hearing all about this apparent dream of yours.”
It took a few seconds longer than it normally would for the meaning behind Artie’s syntax to sink into Myka’s consciousness. “Apparent? Apparent dream? Wait a minute! You just told me none of it was real, that I was affected by the artifact and now you’re saying ‘apparent’? What the hell, Artie?” Myka’s voice was higher than usual, her eyes wide and confused.
“None of it did happen. Honest, Myka. It was all a dream,” Pete rushed to reassure her, his rambling prompted by the look of fear on his partner’s face. “Artie didn’t mean apparent as in, you know, might not have happened. He meant ‘parent’, like the mother of all bad dreams, didn’t you, Artie?”
“Pete,” Artie began, rolling his eyes at the agent’s clarifying attempt to muddy the waters. “What I meant was, perhaps there’s some precognition in the dreams, some hint of things that may possibly happen. After all, very few people know about either the lost Warehouse or the Minoan trident. It can’t hurt to be prepared.” He turned back to Myka, unprepared for the vehemence of the response.
“Artie!” Claudia argued, face outraged.
Her voice was joined by Pete’s, his eyes flitting back and forth between his still groggy partner and their boss. “Come on, Artie, that’s a little harsh, don’t ya think?”
“Oh, please, people, get real…what we know about the spindle’s powers and effects could fit into a thimble….,” Artie began to expound, his latest doctrinarian rant interrupted by Myka’s voice.
“Get out, Artie. Get out of my room, now!” Myka said coldly, eyes stony. “I know you don’t like Helena, that you said you’d never trust her, but if you have even a shred of human decency, you won’t do this, you won’t make this any worse for me than it already is. Now, please, just go.”
Artie did a passable carp impression for a few moments, mouth opening and closing with no sound issuing forth, before he pressed his lips together in what might have been an attempt at an apologetic grimace and turned to leave. As he reached the door, Myka spoke again.
“Artie,” Myka stated unemotionally, eyes unflinching as they met his. “Just for the record, I’m the only one who’s read the Warehouse manual, remember? I’ve also spent most of my free time for the past year and a half going through the Warehouse files and inventory, including the list of the most sought after items. Warehouse 2 is mentioned several times. But more importantly, Artie, Helena didn’t do it. She didn’t destroy the world; she couldn’t. Even in a nightmare, that’s one thing I’m absolutely certain about.”
Artie gave a half-hearted nod, muttering softly to himself as he stepped into the hallway, “Well, good. That makes one of us.”
Myka closed her eyes, drawing in a deep breath, the images and emotions from her nightmare still vivid, although the edges had begun to blur and soften. Moments had already started to merge and separate, the woof and warp of time shifting and fraying, tearing at the seams. Random images, brief black and white stills flashed across her mind, but the spool of film itself had come undone. The only thing that remained constant was Helena.
“I have to find her,” Myka repeated firmly, though it soon became clear as she once more attempted to stand that her voice was in far better shape than her legs.
“Dude, come on. Myka, seriously, you’ve gotta take it slow and give yourself time to get over this,” Claudia cautioned, moving around the bed to gently grasp Myka’s forearms, urging her to sit back down. “Pete’ll go and find, H.G., won’t you, Pete?”
“Um, yeah. Sure. I’ll track her down,” Pete readily agreed, obviously more than a little anxious to be away from the tension and emotion in the room, not that Myka could blame him.
“Would you? I really just need to talk to her, to explain,” Myka asked, doe eyes wide and pleading. “Please, just ask her to listen to me.”
“Gotcha. I’m on it,” Pete responded, backing quickly toward the door. “Leave it to the Pete-ster.”
“He’ll find her,” Claudia comforted her as Pete beat a hasty retreat. She climbed onto the bed, positioning herself next to Myka.
Sitting up against the headboard of Myka’s bed, shoulders touching, Claudia listened as Myka related the contents of her dream in a dull monotone, the lack of inflection only serving to make the events more terrifying and dire. She intentionally left out the part about she and Helena being lovers. There were some things too private to share with anyone. Including Helena. Not that she had to worry about that now, considering that the woman in question had run away from her, possibly run out of her life completely.
“It was so real, Claudia. As real as this room, as real as the two of us,” Myka said softly, her expression still so bewildered that Claudia moved a little closer.
As Myka finished her story, Claudia wracked her brain to come up with some new reassurance. “I know. But it wasn’t. I swear to you, Myka, it wasn’t real,” Claudia promised her for what felt like the hundredth time, hand resting lightly on Myka’s right forearm. “It was just a wicked bad dream.”
Myka didn’t reply, sinking into the murky depths of her thoughts. Every few minutes she would take in a deep, shuddering breath, her left hand in constant motion as she twirled a piece of her hair, the curl twining and circling her finger.
She still felt the weight of grief and anger and overwhelming sadness that had been her constant companion in that other reality, now tempered with immense guilt that she had caused the one person in the world she would never wish to harm such intense pain. The stricken expression in Helena’s dark eyes seemed to have imprinted itself on her retinas, cast in negative when she closed her lids.
“I really need to find Helena,” Myka said softly, her voice catching as she said the name. “God, Claudia, did you see her face when I was ranting about her betraying me? I hurt her so much. I need to talk to her, Claudia. I need to explain.”
“Myka, she knows it wasn’t you, it was that frakin’ spindle. I’m sure Pete’s found her,” Claudia comforted, her voice filling with wonder as she continued. “It’s actually pretty amazing, if you think about it. I mean, that much detail and that much time passing. You must have some fantabulous imagination to have come up with some of that stuff.”
Myka gave a snort of bitter laughter. “I was a geek, remember? I always had my head buried in a book. It was my escape from my life and I learned to create these elaborate fantasies. I could read and picture every scene, every detail. I could even project myself into the story, become one of the characters, because anyone else’s life had to be better than mine.”
Claudia nodded empathetically. “Been there, done that, dude. Except for me, it was the virtual world. On a computer, I didn’t have to be me anymore. I could control my life.”
“I think that’s one of the things that disturbed me so much about the nightmare: I had no control over anything. Even though I was living it all, it was like I was watching parts of it happen, but I couldn’t stop it,” Myka said grimly. “I ended up chasing this person who was supposed to be Helena, but who wasn’t the person I knew, the person I trusted, and I didn’t know how to reach her.”
“So, you told Artie that H.G. didn’t end up sending us all into the deep freeze,” Claudia said. “You must have found a way to reach her. I mean, you said she didn’t do it.”
Myka shook her head suddenly, pushing away from the headboard to wrap her arms around her knees. Her eyes grew distant as she spoke, her gaze fixed inward. “That’s the thing though. It’s so easy to fall back into the idea that any of that was real. I know that it wasn’t.
“And I think during most of my ordeal, that maybe, on some level I wasn’t aware of, my mind knew that it wasn’t real. I remember standing there as the dream Helena thrust the trident into the ground and thinking, ‘she’s not capable of doing this, not capable of harming anyone else’s child’. I even said it to her.
“Even with everything that had happened, I knew that the person standing there threatening to destroy the world wasn’t her. Not the Helena I knew, that I loved.”
As the words left her lips, Myka gasped and froze. With a deep breath, she turned to Claudia, expression vulnerable and questioning.
“Myka,” Claudia replied to the unspoken query. “Do you really think I wouldn’t be cool with it? Or, to be honest, that, you know, I didn’t have kind of a clue?”
“Really?” Myka asked, although to which part of the statement neither of them was sure.
“Really, no, I couldn’t care less, and really sometimes I just want to yell at you two to either get a room or stop making goo-goo eyes at each other,” Claudia laughed, a little of the tension lifting.
“Claudia, we do not make goo-goo or any other kinds of eyes at each other. We’re professionals, not sappy, lovesick teenagers,” Myka protested, her face suffused with color as she suddenly found something immensely interesting in the pattern of her bedspread.
“You so do,” Claudia crowed. “And, now it makes perfect sense that she was the one who needed to kiss you.”
“Kiss me?” Myka squeaked nervously.
“Yeah, you know, like in the fairytale. Nobody believed me, but when dunking the spindle didn’t wake you up, I made Pete kiss you,” Claudia recounted. Seeing the grimace of distaste on Myka’s face at the mention of her partner’s kiss, Claudia quickly moved on. “He was the nearest thing we had to a handsome prince. But it didn’t work, so H.G. kissed you.”
“Yeah, Claude, you could probably get away with describing Helena as handsome, although I’d lean more towards stunning, but either way, you can never call her a ‘prince’,” Myka protested, brows lowered in confusion.
“No, I know she isn’t. That’s the thing, it wasn’t the kiss of a handsome prince. Leena reminded us it was actually true love’s kiss that broke the curse,” Claudia explained. “H.G. kissed you and you woke up. Hence, true love and all kinds of mushiness.”
The planes of Myka’s face softened, smoothing out like clay under a potter’s fingers. A bemused smile touched the corners of her full lips, green eyes lit with an inner light at the knowledge that Helena’s kiss had been what had awoken her.
“Great. I’m Princess Fiona. Now I guess I’ll have to wait until the sun goes down to see if I’m a really a princess or an ogre,” she chuckled quietly.
“Well, considering what H.G. looks like, I’d put my money on the princess. Now if Pete had done the deed, I might lean the other way,” Claudia teased, pleased to see some of the sadness leaving Myka’s face. In the next moment, however, the expression of sorrow returned, stronger than before.
Her breath ratcheted down her throat as a single tear tracked down her cheek. She quickly swiped it away, pressing her lids closed tightly to stem the flow that she knew was threatening to overwhelm her.
“God, Claudia, I really…I care about her so much. I can’t believe I hurt her like this. I just need to explain it to her, make her see that she was wrong,” Myka lamented, her sense of reserve kicking in and preventing her form uttering that word again, that word that held far more power than the spindle.
“Wrong about what?” Claudia asked.
“She said that she was my deepest, darkest fear. She isn’t. I am. I’m my deepest, darkest fear,” Myka explained earnestly, voice thick with emotion. “I’ve spent my whole life second-guessing myself. Growing up, no one was right except my father, and so I learned at an early age not to rely on my own judgment. I’m the one who trusted her, I’m the one the Regents listened to. And all the time Artie has been telling me how wrong I am, how if I’m really lucky, I just might live to regret believing her.
“The thing is, I knew I was right. I still know it. I trust her completely. I just don’t trust myself. And the thought of losing her, like Sam…,” Myka’s voice trailed off, a shadow settling over her eyes like clouds across the sun.
“That’s not something about which you need worry, darling.” The rich, soothing voice came from the doorway.
Myka’s head snapped up, her breath leaving her in a gasp. “Helena.”
“I do hope you’ll forgive me for eavesdropping. At first, I didn’t wish to be rude and interrupt your conversation, but I couldn’t help overhear part of what you were saying and I must admit, my curiosity got the better of me,” Helena explained politely, only the intense look in her eyes belying the casualness of the statement.
“Um, you know what, I’m gonna go and check on…um…dinner. Yeah, I’m gonna go see if Leena needs help with dinner,” Claudia stuttered, inching sideways toward the door. When neither woman acknowledged her words, she simply slipped out with a murmured, “Pete, you are the man”, pulling the door closed behind her.
Helena crossed hesitantly toward the bed, the small smile on her face uncertain.
“How much did you hear?” Myka asked, her own feelings of insecurity stamped on her features. Most of her was mortified that Helena might have overheard her confession concerning her feelings; however, a small part felt a rush of relief at not having to look into those dark eyes and lay bare her soul.
“I arrived just about the time that you were describing meeting Valda in Egypt. I know I either should have announced my presence or departed, but I was rather riveted by the tale, especially since I was one of the featured players, albeit the villain of the piece. I realize that I should have left but, to be frank, I felt like Daphne, grown roots and unable to move,” Helena admitted chagrined, her voice and posture still somewhat stiff and stilted.
“I am so glad that Pete found you. I tried to go after you, but…well, the spirit was willing but rest of me wasn’t so cooperative,” Myka explained urgently, needing Helena to know how desperately she had wanted to follow her.
“Oh, darling, are you all right?” Helena asked, all attempts at maintaining some emotional distance forgotten as she took the few remaining steps to the bed. Only when she reached out her hand to touch Myka’s cheek did she pause, her arm dropping like a lead weight to her side. “Do you need Dr. Calder? I know Artie can’t stand me, but he cares about you. I can have Pete or Claudia ask him to call her.”
“I’m fine. Honest. I guess it took more out of me than I thought, that’s all,” Myka assured her. “I’m really fine.”
Helena exhaled the breath she’d been holding, the tightness of her expression slackening in relief. “You’re sure?”
“Helena, I’m okay. It’s you I’m worried about,” Myka answered, patting the bed beside her. “That’s why I sent Pete to find you.”
Helena sat gingerly on the very edge of the bed, the mattress shifting slightly. “Although I have no doubt that he made a Herculean effort, Pete didn’t locate me. I came back of my own accord, after I realized that I was behaving like a petulant child. I hope you can forgive me, Myka.”
I hope you can forgive me. The words had an echoing resonance in her mind, as the nightmarish events in Warehouse 2 replayed. Closing her eyes and breathing deeply, Myka willed away the scent of dust and sand and the tingle as the arching energy of the Tesla met her body.
“Not real, not real, not real”, she repeated over and over in her head.
“Myka? Darling, are you certain you’re all right?” Helena asked, the concern and tinge of fear in her voice cutting through Myka’s panicked mantra.
Forcing her eyes open, she met Helena’s worried gaze. “I’m all right. I just…I keep getting these flashes, images from the dream and they’re a little disconcerting. I’m sure they’ll stop soon. They’re not nearly as sharp as they were earlier.
“And as for forgiveness, Helena, you have nothing to apologize to me about. Nothing. I’m the one who said all those horrible things to you. I’m the one who should be apologizing. And I do. I am so, so sorry.”
Before she could say more, Myka felt the cool brush of Helena’s fingers across her lips, silencing her quite effectively. “Myka, you were under the influence of a very powerful artifact, the effects of which I was very much aware, and yet, when you finally woke up, confused, frightened, utterly bewildered, instead of being understanding and patient, I bolted out of here like a startled horse. Not exactly the actions of a friend.”
“Well, considering that I just accused you of being an evil villain intent on destroying the world, I think that reaction was pretty understandable,” Myka countered, watching as the other woman drew back inside herself, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell.
Myka stared attentively at Helena’s face, intent on finding the minute changes, the subtle shifts that no one else seemed able to see; the nearly undetectable quirk of an eyebrow, the twitch at the corner of those delectable lips, the narrowing of those mysterious, dark eyes. Intent on sussing out something, anything that would give her a glimpse into what Helena was thinking, what she was feeling.
Because if Myka had learned anything about Helena Wells, it was that time and experience had brought with them a caution, a reserve that was nigh on impossible to breach unless the lady herself offered the keys. She knew that Helena carried burdens that would have brought tyrants and conquerors to their knees: the horrific loss of her child, the brutal retribution she wreaked upon the men who had murdered her daughter; and finally her slow descent into mad obsession that had ended with the death of her colleague and ultimately led her to ask to be encased in bronze.
A hundred years of solitude, with nothing to do but think, unable to move, unable to escape, had surely marked her psyche in ways that Myka did not even want to begin to contemplate. That she was sane at all was a testament to her strength of character and her formidable will. And yet, despite all that she had endured, Myka knew, as surely as she knew that the earth would continue spinning on its axis eons after they were gone, that the good inside Helena far outweighed any faint potential to harm.
It had taken surviving a soul-scarring nightmare but Myka realized something: in the end, for her, none of that mattered; she loved Helena and that was all she needed to know.
“Helena?” Myka reached out a hand, wrapping her fingers gently around Helena’s wrist, the bones beneath her hand seeming as fragile as a bird’s. The eyes that met hers were clouded and unreadable. “Helena?”
“Did you mean it? What you told Claudia?” Helena asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
Myka knew exactly what Helena was asking, knew that they had been dancing a slow, decorous waltz around those few words, around all of her words, since Helena had come into the room. Funny, how much easier it had been to say them aloud to Claudia.
Now, suddenly, the tune of the dance had changed, the tempo segueing into the low, seductive rhythm of a tango, pulling them inexorably toward one another. Her body screamed for her to give in to the steady beat of the music, but her brain pulled away, as fear trumped longing.
“About what?” Myka hedged, nervously wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue.
“Myka,” Helena said impatiently, “you know precisely to what I’m referring.”
“Oh, you mean, when I said you weren’t my biggest fear, that I am?” Myka offered, her voice rambling. She felt as if she were sliding a gambling chip across the table, unwilling to admit that she’d already shown her entire hand. “Yes, I meant it. I told you about Sam, about what happened and that I still have this part of me that thinks it was my fault. A part that constantly second-guesses every decision I make. The artifact played on that, on my judgment about you, about Artie’s conviction that you can’t be trusted, about what happened the last time I got too close and let my emotions take over.”
“Myka,” Helena began, her next words drowned out as Myka continued.
“And of course, there’s the whole thing with my father, who is actually a lot like Artie, or Artie is a lot like him, anyway, they both have this insatiable need to be right and that’s shaped my entire way of looking at the world and trusting other people. And trusting myself. Mostly trusting myself.
“I trust you, though. I really do. I know that you would never have done anything like that. I know you would never harm anyone else’s child, that you would never allow any mother to go through what you did. I also know you would never hurt me,” Myka barreled on, unable to stop as the words flowed out like water from a broken pipe.
“Myka,” Helena’s voice was sharper this time, as she tried to stem the flood of words, to little avail.
“Even in my dream, despite being controlled by the spindle, I must have been able to change some of the events. Because you didn’t do it, you didn’t destroy the world. You gave yourself up, for me,” Myka finished, the last dribble of words falling with a tiny splash.
“Did you mean it when you said you loved me?” Helena demanded gently, eyes earnest, as her hand came up to cup Myka’s cheek.
For a moment, all Myka could focus on was the warmth spreading from Helena’s hand along her cheek and down the length of her neck to settle suspiciously close to her heart.
“Yes. I meant that, too. I meant that most of all,” she pronounced solemnly, turning her face to place a fleeting kiss on the palm of Helena’s hand. “Helena, my deepest, darkest fear? It’s losing you, the way I lost Sam. What I felt for him wasn’t even close to how I feel for you, and his dying nearly destroyed me.
“In my nightmare, everything, all my insecurities, coalesced into these spiraling events I couldn’t control. Do you know where I was when you woke me up? I was standing on a cliff over the Missouri River, in Helena, Montana. I had just taken that last step off the edge. I found out what it felt like to lose you. I don’t ever want to know what that feels like again.”
Helena leaned forward, for the second time in as many days, and gently captured Myka’s lips with her own. Myka could sense the gathering of emotion inside Helena rising, lava ascending through rough stone, seeking out the freedom of the air and earth; could sense that it was all the older woman could do to contain it, tempering the kiss with every ounce of tenderness and love she had within her.
It was Myka who deepened the kiss, Myka who pulled Helena closer, slipping one hand into the cool silk of her hair. She slid her other hand down to Helena’s waist, grasping hold of the belt loops of her pants and suddenly levering her over, so that Helena found herself ensconced very comfortably across Myka’s lap. Without conscious thought, Helena wrapped her arms around Myka’s slender frame, fingers clutching tightly for purchase as Myka kissed her passionately, small moans and gasps punctuating the silence of the room.
Eventually a need for air drew them apart a bit. “Wow,” Helena murmured, sounding for all the world as if she had just run a four minute mile. “Wow. I wasn’t expecting you to be so…demonstrative. Or quite so forceful.”
Myka grinned at her, a furious blush spreading like wildfire across her cheeks. “Well, I…I mean…in my dream we had….we were…,” she stammered, embarrassingly flummoxed at how to say the words out loud.
Helena laughed, the sound slipping like warm silk along Myka’s skin. “You can kiss me like that but you can’t tell me that in your dream we were lovers?”“
“It was a really long dream,” Myka explained, still blushing. “Months had gone by since our first kiss…”
“Which was two nights ago,” Helena supplied, a decidedly Cheshire smirk on her lovely face.
“God, that’s right. I remember now. I mean, I remembered before, but you know, it was a much longer time ago for me,” Myka rambled again, the intoxicating feel of Helena in her lap doing a very good job of short-circuiting what few synapses had managed to repair themselves since she awoke.
“So, we were lovers?” Helena purred, shifting a little to get more comfortable, completely aware of the effect her movements had on Myka.
“You did that on purpose,” she accused, finding nothing but gleeful amusement in Helena’s eyes.
“I did nothing of the sort. I was merely trying to find a slightly more comfortable position,” Helena countered with a wicked smile. “So, did you find being my lover….satisfactory?”
Myka smiled back, brushing the back of her hand along the front of Helena’s blouse, across her breasts, feeling the shiver that coursed through the body in her arms. “I suppose I could tell you about it-or I could just show you---your choice.”
Helena’s voice dropped to a sinful register. “I’ve always been a firm believer in hands-on demonstrations.” She tilted her head, eyes fixed on the lush mouth before her, but Myka’s hand on her shoulder stayed her.
“I don’t expect you to say it, you know,” Myka said quietly, her mood shifting suddenly from teasing to somber. “I know you changed the subject, the way you always do when something gets too emotional, but it’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”
Myka watched as Helena’s eyes fluttered closed, for once the play of feelings on her face plain and clear as day. At length those dark eyes opened, the shear curtain of reticence that usually covered them gone. Instead, the whole of Helena Well’s heart was laid bare for her to see and Myka finally discovered what drowning would have felt like.
“It does matter. You matter, more than I can possibly make you understand. You are all I have. I know I told you that the reason I wanted to come back to the Warehouse was because I had no other tether in this world, but I was wrong. You are my tether. You are the one thing that keeps me here,” Helena said softly, leaning her forehead against Myka’s collarbone.
“As much as losing me is your greatest fear, you have other things, other people about whom you care: your parents, Pete, Claudia, even Artie. Without me, you would survive; they would see to that. I, on the other hand, have nothing, no one else. Believe me, my dearest love, losing you would be the end of me, for I do love you, Myka Bering.”
Myka couldn’t stop the tears this time, but now they were tears of happiness, not the devastation she had felt in the jumbled memories of her nightmare. She tilted Helena’s face up and kissed her, kissed her until they both forgot the possibility of separation, of loss, even of death. Until all she could remember of her dream was the feel of Helena’s skin against her own, a memory she had every intention of recreating, over and over and over again.
Fin
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Leena’s Bed and Breakfast, Univille, South Dakota
The sound of Helena’s footsteps faded away, a farewell sentence punctuated by the slamming of the front door. “Helena!” Myka called after her desperately.
Myka struggled into a seated position, awkwardly swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. With a tremendous effort, she rose and attempted to walk, only to stumble with the first step.
“Whoa! Myka!” Claudia cried out, unable to reach the older woman from the opposite side of the bed. Only Pete’s swift movement saved Myka from crumpling to the floor. She sagged bonelessly against him as he guided her back to the bed.
“Steady, partner,” he reassured, helping her to slide back into a semi-recumbent pose against the pillows. “You’ve been completely out for a couple days now. Take it easy.”
“I need to find Helena,” Myka asserted, shaking her head slowly back and forth in an attempt to clear away the remaining vestiges of her artifact induced slumber. It felt like cleaning out a corner of the attic at her parents’ house, cobwebs clinging to her hands, as a feeling of panic overtook her. “I need to talk to her.”
“You need to lie still,” Artie said roughly. “You came dangerously close to dying, Myka. The last thing you need to be doing is traipsing around chasing after Miss Wells.”
“Artie,” Myka protested, running her hand distractedly through her hair, her bottom lip caught between straight white teeth, “I just told everyone that she tried to destroy the world. You saw her face, Artie. She was devastated. I have to explain…I have to try and make sense of it.”
“Speaking of making sense, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened in your dream,” Artie replied, maneuvering the conversation away from the annoying H.G. Wells. “You said something about Warehouse 2 and the Minoan trident, two things I had no idea you knew anything about, so I would be very interested in hearing all about this apparent dream of yours.”
It took a few seconds longer than it normally would for the meaning behind Artie’s syntax to sink into Myka’s consciousness. “Apparent? Apparent dream? Wait a minute! You just told me none of it was real, that I was affected by the artifact and now you’re saying ‘apparent’? What the hell, Artie?” Myka’s voice was higher than usual, her eyes wide and confused.
“None of it did happen. Honest, Myka. It was all a dream,” Pete rushed to reassure her, his rambling prompted by the look of fear on his partner’s face. “Artie didn’t mean apparent as in, you know, might not have happened. He meant ‘parent’, like the mother of all bad dreams, didn’t you, Artie?”
“Pete,” Artie began, rolling his eyes at the agent’s clarifying attempt to muddy the waters. “What I meant was, perhaps there’s some precognition in the dreams, some hint of things that may possibly happen. After all, very few people know about either the lost Warehouse or the Minoan trident. It can’t hurt to be prepared.” He turned back to Myka, unprepared for the vehemence of the response.
“Artie!” Claudia argued, face outraged.
Her voice was joined by Pete’s, his eyes flitting back and forth between his still groggy partner and their boss. “Come on, Artie, that’s a little harsh, don’t ya think?”
“Oh, please, people, get real…what we know about the spindle’s powers and effects could fit into a thimble….,” Artie began to expound, his latest doctrinarian rant interrupted by Myka’s voice.
“Get out, Artie. Get out of my room, now!” Myka said coldly, eyes stony. “I know you don’t like Helena, that you said you’d never trust her, but if you have even a shred of human decency, you won’t do this, you won’t make this any worse for me than it already is. Now, please, just go.”
Artie did a passable carp impression for a few moments, mouth opening and closing with no sound issuing forth, before he pressed his lips together in what might have been an attempt at an apologetic grimace and turned to leave. As he reached the door, Myka spoke again.
“Artie,” Myka stated unemotionally, eyes unflinching as they met his. “Just for the record, I’m the only one who’s read the Warehouse manual, remember? I’ve also spent most of my free time for the past year and a half going through the Warehouse files and inventory, including the list of the most sought after items. Warehouse 2 is mentioned several times. But more importantly, Artie, Helena didn’t do it. She didn’t destroy the world; she couldn’t. Even in a nightmare, that’s one thing I’m absolutely certain about.”
Artie gave a half-hearted nod, muttering softly to himself as he stepped into the hallway, “Well, good. That makes one of us.”
Myka closed her eyes, drawing in a deep breath, the images and emotions from her nightmare still vivid, although the edges had begun to blur and soften. Moments had already started to merge and separate, the woof and warp of time shifting and fraying, tearing at the seams. Random images, brief black and white stills flashed across her mind, but the spool of film itself had come undone. The only thing that remained constant was Helena.
“I have to find her,” Myka repeated firmly, though it soon became clear as she once more attempted to stand that her voice was in far better shape than her legs.
“Dude, come on. Myka, seriously, you’ve gotta take it slow and give yourself time to get over this,” Claudia cautioned, moving around the bed to gently grasp Myka’s forearms, urging her to sit back down. “Pete’ll go and find, H.G., won’t you, Pete?”
“Um, yeah. Sure. I’ll track her down,” Pete readily agreed, obviously more than a little anxious to be away from the tension and emotion in the room, not that Myka could blame him.
“Would you? I really just need to talk to her, to explain,” Myka asked, doe eyes wide and pleading. “Please, just ask her to listen to me.”
“Gotcha. I’m on it,” Pete responded, backing quickly toward the door. “Leave it to the Pete-ster.”
“He’ll find her,” Claudia comforted her as Pete beat a hasty retreat. She climbed onto the bed, positioning herself next to Myka.
Sitting up against the headboard of Myka’s bed, shoulders touching, Claudia listened as Myka related the contents of her dream in a dull monotone, the lack of inflection only serving to make the events more terrifying and dire. She intentionally left out the part about she and Helena being lovers. There were some things too private to share with anyone. Including Helena. Not that she had to worry about that now, considering that the woman in question had run away from her, possibly run out of her life completely.
“It was so real, Claudia. As real as this room, as real as the two of us,” Myka said softly, her expression still so bewildered that Claudia moved a little closer.
As Myka finished her story, Claudia wracked her brain to come up with some new reassurance. “I know. But it wasn’t. I swear to you, Myka, it wasn’t real,” Claudia promised her for what felt like the hundredth time, hand resting lightly on Myka’s right forearm. “It was just a wicked bad dream.”
Myka didn’t reply, sinking into the murky depths of her thoughts. Every few minutes she would take in a deep, shuddering breath, her left hand in constant motion as she twirled a piece of her hair, the curl twining and circling her finger.
She still felt the weight of grief and anger and overwhelming sadness that had been her constant companion in that other reality, now tempered with immense guilt that she had caused the one person in the world she would never wish to harm such intense pain. The stricken expression in Helena’s dark eyes seemed to have imprinted itself on her retinas, cast in negative when she closed her lids.
“I really need to find Helena,” Myka said softly, her voice catching as she said the name. “God, Claudia, did you see her face when I was ranting about her betraying me? I hurt her so much. I need to talk to her, Claudia. I need to explain.”
“Myka, she knows it wasn’t you, it was that frakin’ spindle. I’m sure Pete’s found her,” Claudia comforted, her voice filling with wonder as she continued. “It’s actually pretty amazing, if you think about it. I mean, that much detail and that much time passing. You must have some fantabulous imagination to have come up with some of that stuff.”
Myka gave a snort of bitter laughter. “I was a geek, remember? I always had my head buried in a book. It was my escape from my life and I learned to create these elaborate fantasies. I could read and picture every scene, every detail. I could even project myself into the story, become one of the characters, because anyone else’s life had to be better than mine.”
Claudia nodded empathetically. “Been there, done that, dude. Except for me, it was the virtual world. On a computer, I didn’t have to be me anymore. I could control my life.”
“I think that’s one of the things that disturbed me so much about the nightmare: I had no control over anything. Even though I was living it all, it was like I was watching parts of it happen, but I couldn’t stop it,” Myka said grimly. “I ended up chasing this person who was supposed to be Helena, but who wasn’t the person I knew, the person I trusted, and I didn’t know how to reach her.”
“So, you told Artie that H.G. didn’t end up sending us all into the deep freeze,” Claudia said. “You must have found a way to reach her. I mean, you said she didn’t do it.”
Myka shook her head suddenly, pushing away from the headboard to wrap her arms around her knees. Her eyes grew distant as she spoke, her gaze fixed inward. “That’s the thing though. It’s so easy to fall back into the idea that any of that was real. I know that it wasn’t.
“And I think during most of my ordeal, that maybe, on some level I wasn’t aware of, my mind knew that it wasn’t real. I remember standing there as the dream Helena thrust the trident into the ground and thinking, ‘she’s not capable of doing this, not capable of harming anyone else’s child’. I even said it to her.
“Even with everything that had happened, I knew that the person standing there threatening to destroy the world wasn’t her. Not the Helena I knew, that I loved.”
As the words left her lips, Myka gasped and froze. With a deep breath, she turned to Claudia, expression vulnerable and questioning.
“Myka,” Claudia replied to the unspoken query. “Do you really think I wouldn’t be cool with it? Or, to be honest, that, you know, I didn’t have kind of a clue?”
“Really?” Myka asked, although to which part of the statement neither of them was sure.
“Really, no, I couldn’t care less, and really sometimes I just want to yell at you two to either get a room or stop making goo-goo eyes at each other,” Claudia laughed, a little of the tension lifting.
“Claudia, we do not make goo-goo or any other kinds of eyes at each other. We’re professionals, not sappy, lovesick teenagers,” Myka protested, her face suffused with color as she suddenly found something immensely interesting in the pattern of her bedspread.
“You so do,” Claudia crowed. “And, now it makes perfect sense that she was the one who needed to kiss you.”
“Kiss me?” Myka squeaked nervously.
“Yeah, you know, like in the fairytale. Nobody believed me, but when dunking the spindle didn’t wake you up, I made Pete kiss you,” Claudia recounted. Seeing the grimace of distaste on Myka’s face at the mention of her partner’s kiss, Claudia quickly moved on. “He was the nearest thing we had to a handsome prince. But it didn’t work, so H.G. kissed you.”
“Yeah, Claude, you could probably get away with describing Helena as handsome, although I’d lean more towards stunning, but either way, you can never call her a ‘prince’,” Myka protested, brows lowered in confusion.
“No, I know she isn’t. That’s the thing, it wasn’t the kiss of a handsome prince. Leena reminded us it was actually true love’s kiss that broke the curse,” Claudia explained. “H.G. kissed you and you woke up. Hence, true love and all kinds of mushiness.”
The planes of Myka’s face softened, smoothing out like clay under a potter’s fingers. A bemused smile touched the corners of her full lips, green eyes lit with an inner light at the knowledge that Helena’s kiss had been what had awoken her.
“Great. I’m Princess Fiona. Now I guess I’ll have to wait until the sun goes down to see if I’m a really a princess or an ogre,” she chuckled quietly.
“Well, considering what H.G. looks like, I’d put my money on the princess. Now if Pete had done the deed, I might lean the other way,” Claudia teased, pleased to see some of the sadness leaving Myka’s face. In the next moment, however, the expression of sorrow returned, stronger than before.
Her breath ratcheted down her throat as a single tear tracked down her cheek. She quickly swiped it away, pressing her lids closed tightly to stem the flow that she knew was threatening to overwhelm her.
“God, Claudia, I really…I care about her so much. I can’t believe I hurt her like this. I just need to explain it to her, make her see that she was wrong,” Myka lamented, her sense of reserve kicking in and preventing her form uttering that word again, that word that held far more power than the spindle.
“Wrong about what?” Claudia asked.
“She said that she was my deepest, darkest fear. She isn’t. I am. I’m my deepest, darkest fear,” Myka explained earnestly, voice thick with emotion. “I’ve spent my whole life second-guessing myself. Growing up, no one was right except my father, and so I learned at an early age not to rely on my own judgment. I’m the one who trusted her, I’m the one the Regents listened to. And all the time Artie has been telling me how wrong I am, how if I’m really lucky, I just might live to regret believing her.
“The thing is, I knew I was right. I still know it. I trust her completely. I just don’t trust myself. And the thought of losing her, like Sam…,” Myka’s voice trailed off, a shadow settling over her eyes like clouds across the sun.
“That’s not something about which you need worry, darling.” The rich, soothing voice came from the doorway.
Myka’s head snapped up, her breath leaving her in a gasp. “Helena.”
“I do hope you’ll forgive me for eavesdropping. At first, I didn’t wish to be rude and interrupt your conversation, but I couldn’t help overhear part of what you were saying and I must admit, my curiosity got the better of me,” Helena explained politely, only the intense look in her eyes belying the casualness of the statement.
“Um, you know what, I’m gonna go and check on…um…dinner. Yeah, I’m gonna go see if Leena needs help with dinner,” Claudia stuttered, inching sideways toward the door. When neither woman acknowledged her words, she simply slipped out with a murmured, “Pete, you are the man”, pulling the door closed behind her.
Helena crossed hesitantly toward the bed, the small smile on her face uncertain.
“How much did you hear?” Myka asked, her own feelings of insecurity stamped on her features. Most of her was mortified that Helena might have overheard her confession concerning her feelings; however, a small part felt a rush of relief at not having to look into those dark eyes and lay bare her soul.
“I arrived just about the time that you were describing meeting Valda in Egypt. I know I either should have announced my presence or departed, but I was rather riveted by the tale, especially since I was one of the featured players, albeit the villain of the piece. I realize that I should have left but, to be frank, I felt like Daphne, grown roots and unable to move,” Helena admitted chagrined, her voice and posture still somewhat stiff and stilted.
“I am so glad that Pete found you. I tried to go after you, but…well, the spirit was willing but rest of me wasn’t so cooperative,” Myka explained urgently, needing Helena to know how desperately she had wanted to follow her.
“Oh, darling, are you all right?” Helena asked, all attempts at maintaining some emotional distance forgotten as she took the few remaining steps to the bed. Only when she reached out her hand to touch Myka’s cheek did she pause, her arm dropping like a lead weight to her side. “Do you need Dr. Calder? I know Artie can’t stand me, but he cares about you. I can have Pete or Claudia ask him to call her.”
“I’m fine. Honest. I guess it took more out of me than I thought, that’s all,” Myka assured her. “I’m really fine.”
Helena exhaled the breath she’d been holding, the tightness of her expression slackening in relief. “You’re sure?”
“Helena, I’m okay. It’s you I’m worried about,” Myka answered, patting the bed beside her. “That’s why I sent Pete to find you.”
Helena sat gingerly on the very edge of the bed, the mattress shifting slightly. “Although I have no doubt that he made a Herculean effort, Pete didn’t locate me. I came back of my own accord, after I realized that I was behaving like a petulant child. I hope you can forgive me, Myka.”
I hope you can forgive me. The words had an echoing resonance in her mind, as the nightmarish events in Warehouse 2 replayed. Closing her eyes and breathing deeply, Myka willed away the scent of dust and sand and the tingle as the arching energy of the Tesla met her body.
“Not real, not real, not real”, she repeated over and over in her head.
“Myka? Darling, are you certain you’re all right?” Helena asked, the concern and tinge of fear in her voice cutting through Myka’s panicked mantra.
Forcing her eyes open, she met Helena’s worried gaze. “I’m all right. I just…I keep getting these flashes, images from the dream and they’re a little disconcerting. I’m sure they’ll stop soon. They’re not nearly as sharp as they were earlier.
“And as for forgiveness, Helena, you have nothing to apologize to me about. Nothing. I’m the one who said all those horrible things to you. I’m the one who should be apologizing. And I do. I am so, so sorry.”
Before she could say more, Myka felt the cool brush of Helena’s fingers across her lips, silencing her quite effectively. “Myka, you were under the influence of a very powerful artifact, the effects of which I was very much aware, and yet, when you finally woke up, confused, frightened, utterly bewildered, instead of being understanding and patient, I bolted out of here like a startled horse. Not exactly the actions of a friend.”
“Well, considering that I just accused you of being an evil villain intent on destroying the world, I think that reaction was pretty understandable,” Myka countered, watching as the other woman drew back inside herself, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell.
Myka stared attentively at Helena’s face, intent on finding the minute changes, the subtle shifts that no one else seemed able to see; the nearly undetectable quirk of an eyebrow, the twitch at the corner of those delectable lips, the narrowing of those mysterious, dark eyes. Intent on sussing out something, anything that would give her a glimpse into what Helena was thinking, what she was feeling.
Because if Myka had learned anything about Helena Wells, it was that time and experience had brought with them a caution, a reserve that was nigh on impossible to breach unless the lady herself offered the keys. She knew that Helena carried burdens that would have brought tyrants and conquerors to their knees: the horrific loss of her child, the brutal retribution she wreaked upon the men who had murdered her daughter; and finally her slow descent into mad obsession that had ended with the death of her colleague and ultimately led her to ask to be encased in bronze.
A hundred years of solitude, with nothing to do but think, unable to move, unable to escape, had surely marked her psyche in ways that Myka did not even want to begin to contemplate. That she was sane at all was a testament to her strength of character and her formidable will. And yet, despite all that she had endured, Myka knew, as surely as she knew that the earth would continue spinning on its axis eons after they were gone, that the good inside Helena far outweighed any faint potential to harm.
It had taken surviving a soul-scarring nightmare but Myka realized something: in the end, for her, none of that mattered; she loved Helena and that was all she needed to know.
“Helena?” Myka reached out a hand, wrapping her fingers gently around Helena’s wrist, the bones beneath her hand seeming as fragile as a bird’s. The eyes that met hers were clouded and unreadable. “Helena?”
“Did you mean it? What you told Claudia?” Helena asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
Myka knew exactly what Helena was asking, knew that they had been dancing a slow, decorous waltz around those few words, around all of her words, since Helena had come into the room. Funny, how much easier it had been to say them aloud to Claudia.
Now, suddenly, the tune of the dance had changed, the tempo segueing into the low, seductive rhythm of a tango, pulling them inexorably toward one another. Her body screamed for her to give in to the steady beat of the music, but her brain pulled away, as fear trumped longing.
“About what?” Myka hedged, nervously wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue.
“Myka,” Helena said impatiently, “you know precisely to what I’m referring.”
“Oh, you mean, when I said you weren’t my biggest fear, that I am?” Myka offered, her voice rambling. She felt as if she were sliding a gambling chip across the table, unwilling to admit that she’d already shown her entire hand. “Yes, I meant it. I told you about Sam, about what happened and that I still have this part of me that thinks it was my fault. A part that constantly second-guesses every decision I make. The artifact played on that, on my judgment about you, about Artie’s conviction that you can’t be trusted, about what happened the last time I got too close and let my emotions take over.”
“Myka,” Helena began, her next words drowned out as Myka continued.
“And of course, there’s the whole thing with my father, who is actually a lot like Artie, or Artie is a lot like him, anyway, they both have this insatiable need to be right and that’s shaped my entire way of looking at the world and trusting other people. And trusting myself. Mostly trusting myself.
“I trust you, though. I really do. I know that you would never have done anything like that. I know you would never harm anyone else’s child, that you would never allow any mother to go through what you did. I also know you would never hurt me,” Myka barreled on, unable to stop as the words flowed out like water from a broken pipe.
“Myka,” Helena’s voice was sharper this time, as she tried to stem the flood of words, to little avail.
“Even in my dream, despite being controlled by the spindle, I must have been able to change some of the events. Because you didn’t do it, you didn’t destroy the world. You gave yourself up, for me,” Myka finished, the last dribble of words falling with a tiny splash.
“Did you mean it when you said you loved me?” Helena demanded gently, eyes earnest, as her hand came up to cup Myka’s cheek.
For a moment, all Myka could focus on was the warmth spreading from Helena’s hand along her cheek and down the length of her neck to settle suspiciously close to her heart.
“Yes. I meant that, too. I meant that most of all,” she pronounced solemnly, turning her face to place a fleeting kiss on the palm of Helena’s hand. “Helena, my deepest, darkest fear? It’s losing you, the way I lost Sam. What I felt for him wasn’t even close to how I feel for you, and his dying nearly destroyed me.
“In my nightmare, everything, all my insecurities, coalesced into these spiraling events I couldn’t control. Do you know where I was when you woke me up? I was standing on a cliff over the Missouri River, in Helena, Montana. I had just taken that last step off the edge. I found out what it felt like to lose you. I don’t ever want to know what that feels like again.”
Helena leaned forward, for the second time in as many days, and gently captured Myka’s lips with her own. Myka could sense the gathering of emotion inside Helena rising, lava ascending through rough stone, seeking out the freedom of the air and earth; could sense that it was all the older woman could do to contain it, tempering the kiss with every ounce of tenderness and love she had within her.
It was Myka who deepened the kiss, Myka who pulled Helena closer, slipping one hand into the cool silk of her hair. She slid her other hand down to Helena’s waist, grasping hold of the belt loops of her pants and suddenly levering her over, so that Helena found herself ensconced very comfortably across Myka’s lap. Without conscious thought, Helena wrapped her arms around Myka’s slender frame, fingers clutching tightly for purchase as Myka kissed her passionately, small moans and gasps punctuating the silence of the room.
Eventually a need for air drew them apart a bit. “Wow,” Helena murmured, sounding for all the world as if she had just run a four minute mile. “Wow. I wasn’t expecting you to be so…demonstrative. Or quite so forceful.”
Myka grinned at her, a furious blush spreading like wildfire across her cheeks. “Well, I…I mean…in my dream we had….we were…,” she stammered, embarrassingly flummoxed at how to say the words out loud.
Helena laughed, the sound slipping like warm silk along Myka’s skin. “You can kiss me like that but you can’t tell me that in your dream we were lovers?”“
“It was a really long dream,” Myka explained, still blushing. “Months had gone by since our first kiss…”
“Which was two nights ago,” Helena supplied, a decidedly Cheshire smirk on her lovely face.
“God, that’s right. I remember now. I mean, I remembered before, but you know, it was a much longer time ago for me,” Myka rambled again, the intoxicating feel of Helena in her lap doing a very good job of short-circuiting what few synapses had managed to repair themselves since she awoke.
“So, we were lovers?” Helena purred, shifting a little to get more comfortable, completely aware of the effect her movements had on Myka.
“You did that on purpose,” she accused, finding nothing but gleeful amusement in Helena’s eyes.
“I did nothing of the sort. I was merely trying to find a slightly more comfortable position,” Helena countered with a wicked smile. “So, did you find being my lover….satisfactory?”
Myka smiled back, brushing the back of her hand along the front of Helena’s blouse, across her breasts, feeling the shiver that coursed through the body in her arms. “I suppose I could tell you about it-or I could just show you---your choice.”
Helena’s voice dropped to a sinful register. “I’ve always been a firm believer in hands-on demonstrations.” She tilted her head, eyes fixed on the lush mouth before her, but Myka’s hand on her shoulder stayed her.
“I don’t expect you to say it, you know,” Myka said quietly, her mood shifting suddenly from teasing to somber. “I know you changed the subject, the way you always do when something gets too emotional, but it’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”
Myka watched as Helena’s eyes fluttered closed, for once the play of feelings on her face plain and clear as day. At length those dark eyes opened, the shear curtain of reticence that usually covered them gone. Instead, the whole of Helena Well’s heart was laid bare for her to see and Myka finally discovered what drowning would have felt like.
“It does matter. You matter, more than I can possibly make you understand. You are all I have. I know I told you that the reason I wanted to come back to the Warehouse was because I had no other tether in this world, but I was wrong. You are my tether. You are the one thing that keeps me here,” Helena said softly, leaning her forehead against Myka’s collarbone.
“As much as losing me is your greatest fear, you have other things, other people about whom you care: your parents, Pete, Claudia, even Artie. Without me, you would survive; they would see to that. I, on the other hand, have nothing, no one else. Believe me, my dearest love, losing you would be the end of me, for I do love you, Myka Bering.”
Myka couldn’t stop the tears this time, but now they were tears of happiness, not the devastation she had felt in the jumbled memories of her nightmare. She tilted Helena’s face up and kissed her, kissed her until they both forgot the possibility of separation, of loss, even of death. Until all she could remember of her dream was the feel of Helena’s skin against her own, a memory she had every intention of recreating, over and over and over again.
Fin