The Lost Prince Read online

  The band stopped. The lead singer, Rick Fiore, approached Tim. His eyes had rolled to their whites. Rick braced the back of Tim’s head as the guitarist fell backward onto the stage. The audience’s collective gasp echoed through the arena. Moments later, some in the audience shouted about not taking the brown acid and snickered. Other fans told those people to go back to Jersey, and a fight broke out. Clarisse grabbed a bottle of water and a towel and ran onto the stage.

  Rick turned off their microphones and asked his guitarist, “What’s up, dude? You dying?”

  “Here, sweetie, have a sip,” Clarisse said. She pulled his shoulder-length brown hair away from his face and put the bottle to his lips.

  Tim took a large swig and shortly caught his breath. “Just had my mind blown,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You dropping acid, Mann?”

  “No.” He took the towel from Clarisse and patted the sweat from his forehead and neck. “It’s just … I just remembered I’m a lute player from an alternate universe on a mission to raise a prince that some dudes in another kingdom are trying to kill. I swore an oath and everything.”

  Clarisse laughed. Rick was not as amused.

  The sound of the crowd’s impatience rose steadily in the background.

  “Mann, we’re on the verge of being the biggest band since U2, and you’re pulling shit like this during our big number?” he asked.

  Clarisse seldom found Rick Fiore’s talent for hyperbole and drama amusing. That, and his bottle-blond David Lee Roth coiffure, was why she dumped him for Tim, who was as cool as a mountain lake. Tim would never mess around with their success, and if he was cracking jokes, it was his way of saying he’d be okay. “Lighten up, Flowers,” she said. It was the nickname she created for him just before they broke up.

  Rick pursed his lips and ground his teeth. “You dumped me for a dude that falls on his ass in the middle of gig?” he said. “You can get his ass off the stage without me.” Rick stormed off to brood in the wings.

  Clarisse turned to her significant other. “Seriously, Manly-Mann, you okay?”

  “I wasn’t joking. That amnesia about my early life … all of a sudden, it was like a wall of memories hit me out of nowhere. I came here years ago with other people to protect a baby prince. I don’t know what happened after that.”

  “Uh, that’s great,” she said, not really sure how to react. Clarisse wondered if Tim was on something after all. They swore never to go down that road. She could put up with the occasional groupie, but not hard drugs. Cocaine had torn her parents apart; that was her deal breaker. The audience started to hiss.

  Rick and the drummer were talking in the corner, shooting dirty glances at them. The paramedics finally showed up and were heading toward them with a stretcher. “Can you finish the show?” she asked him.

  “Heck yeah,” Tim said. “I’ll do five encores. It’s been thirteen years. One more day won’t make a difference. I can get back to that other stuff tomorrow. As he stood, he pumped his fist into the air and yelled, “ROCK ’N’ ROLL!”

  The audience cheered.

  4

  BALZAC

  “What can be said of Lear’s fool?” Balzac Cruz threw the question out to his Elizabethan literature class. He wore a triangular red, yellow, and green jester’s cap with three protruding appendages that ended in small bells and jingled as he moved. Tufts of his gray hair stuck out the sides of the cap. Under a dark brown sports jacket, he wore a cream-colored rayon knit turtleneck that protruded subtly at the waist, green and brown plaid trousers, and oxblood leather loafers.

  Balzac performed as he taught because an entertained mind was the most receptive mind. At least that was what he told the department faculty. But actually, he relished the attention. He received high marks as one of the department’s most favored professors. This was the first year he had taught Elizabethan lit as a night class, though, and he was sure it would be the last. It cut into his nightlife, which for a single man of fifty was generously rich at the university.

  “Lear’s fool saw things clearly,” a female student answered. It was only their second class and Balzac had already pegged her as the overachiever. He suspected her name was Rachel.

  “Clearly?” Balzac asked. “As in he did not need glasses?” Jingle, jingle.

  “He saw things Lear couldn’t or refused to see,” an eager young man wearing the school’s lacrosse jersey said. The boy’s hair was a curly brown tussle as though he’d just rolled out of bed. Balzac licked his lips at the image of him sweaty and hot at the end of a game. Perhaps the night class isn’t a total loss, he thought. Balzac’s hat jingled vigorously.

  “And…?” Balzac prodded.

  “He was loyal,” the overachiever cut back in, annoyed at having her moment usurped by a pretty-boy jock. “The most loyal of Lear’s servants.”

  “True,” Balzac agreed. “But also…”

  A white haze descended upon Balzac’s view of the room, as though everything were behind a sheet of gauze. He was aware that he had stopped talking—couldn’t move his hands or feet. His students, on the other side of the gauze wore worried expressions. The last thing of the room he saw before everything turned solid white was the handsome lacrosse player rushing toward him. Another world took its place before him; a beautiful gleaming city made of marble, brick, and oak. His mother, his father, his teachers, lovers, masters—all came back to him. His mind was the pool at the end of a waterfall as memories of Aandor rushed into his head.

  Slowly the gauze lifted. He was on his back, his students hovering around him, concerned. The strong arms of the lacrosse player cradled him—his hand supported the back of Balzac’s head.

  This lad has earned his A, Balzac thought.

  “Are you okay, Professor Cruz?” the overachiever asked.

  Balzac stood up and brushed himself off. He wiped the sweat from the top of his balding head with a kerchief. “I think we might cancel the rest of tonight’s class,” Balzac said. “I’m not feeling quite myself.”

  His students returned to their seats to gather their belongings. “Someone should see you home,” the overachiever—probably Rachel—said.

  “Perhaps you’re right, my dear.” Balzac turned to the Lacrosse player. “Would you mind terribly seeing me to my flat, uh…”

  “Rodney,” the young man said.

  “Yes, Rodney.” Balzac threw him a grateful smile. The overachiever practically stomped the treads on her shoes flat as she returned to her seat.

  Balzac spied his fool’s cap on the floor. He picked it up. It jingled as he brushed off some dust.

  “The fool…,” he said to the entire room … stopping everyone in their tracks—books half packed.

  Balzac gazed at the cap, seeing more in it than anyone in the room could ever imagine. He looked up at his students and smiled a devilish grin.

  “… as is often the case in Shakespeare, is a commoner with tremendous clarity—and usually the wisest man in the world.”

  CHAPTER 1

  DREDGING THE PAST

  Callum, Catherine, Seth, and Lelani drove into the town of Amenia, New York, weary from the events of the past two days. A fresh dusting of snow had descended on the small locality, which emanated three blocks in all directions from a center traffic light. The Sunoco gas station tucked in one corner was the intersection’s largest presence, joined by a bank, salon, and empty lot on the remaining corners. Its citizens, dressed mostly in overalls, jeans, flannel, and construction boots, went about their business in that contented manner only those far removed from the fast-paced and worried centers of the world could. Nothing was a rush and no one was out to get them. This was the third town they’d visited that day in the vicinity of the portal that Callum and the other guardians had come through thirteen years earlier. Agriculture was a large part of the local economy. Street signs steered tourists to the many vineyards that dotted the region—Cat was always telling Cal how wonderful a winery day trip would be. Today was not tha
t day. Today, Cal hoped to find his lost prince.

  At stake were the lives of millions of people. The Kingdom of Aandor had been invaded by the maleficent war-happy nation of Farrenheil. Callum MacDonnell had come to this alternate universe to save his infant prince from execution. With the prince came his guardians, a ragtag band of servants and soldiers sworn to protect the boy and raise him to adulthood so that he could one day reclaim his throne. But Farrenheil also sent agents to this world, and now they hunted the prince as well. It was a race to get to the boy first.

  Guiding the car, Cal scrutinized each teenaged boy he passed hoping to recognize in their manner some thing that would reveal the prince—his gait, Duke Athelstan’s sharp profile, Duchess Sophia’s ocean-green eyes. It was a long shot, and perhaps they had used their quota of good luck just surviving the attack in the woods. Cal was exhausted—stretched thin by the mishaps, mistakes, and tragedies of his life that had culminated in the past two days. The most personal of his challenges had yet to emerge from its chrysalis; the secret of his betrothed back in Aandor that he had yet to share with his wife.

  I have to tell her was the new mantra that nested in Callum’s thoughts. He had never kept secrets from Catherine before. The past few days had introduced several new firsts in their marriage, but no revelation so far constituted the threat to his marriage that his betrothal would. His wife sat in the passenger seat and serenely took in their surroundings, unknowing of the turmoil in Callum’s heart. The weather had warmed a bit, and the sun cut deeply into the snow turning the ditches beside the road into babbling brooks. The crisp daylight brought out the gray in Catherine’s eyes, and where the light touched her raven tresses it shone blue. She inherited her light skin from the Dutch branch of her family, but Cal always encouraged her to dress as a Native American for Halloween because of her Sioux heritage. You have the cheekbones for war paint, he often teased. In this moment, you would not know from looking at her that their lives had recently been upended. Cal’s elusive past finally caught up with him.

  Cat was understanding of his mission and willing to do her part, to a point. But that point was poorly defined … a hazy dot on the horizon whose distance neither spouse could gauge. They would only know it when they smacked into it. Cat had accepted that Cal was from a feudal kingdom called Aandor in a far-off alternate reality—that his role in that society was to defend the world order, of which his family resided near the top, and that his mission here was to protect and raise a young prince who would one day rule his kingdom. But the betrothal to another woman—a woman he owed a great debt to and that he realized he still loved as much today as he did thirteen years ago—that was the bomb under their bed.

  “This Podunk town makes the other Podunk towns look far less Podunk,” Seth moaned from the backseat. The punk had mastered backhanded compliments. Cal was certain the delinquent knew no other kind.

  “Concentrate,” Lelani scolded. Seth sat in the backseat of the Ford Explorer, and Lelani in the rear cargo area with her upper torso hanging over the seat back. A pile of salt lay in her palm, which she held before Seth. They’d been going over rudimentary sorcery all morning as Cal hopped from town hall to town hall, trying to find records of the events that split his group apart years earlier. It was an important thread to finding the prince.

  “How can I concentrate when you keep yelling ‘concentrate’?” Seth responded.

  “I am not yelling,” she said, though Cal heard the strain behind Lelani’s calm response. Seth had a talent for testing the limits of patience.

  The backseat bickering chafed the sheath on Callum’s last nerve. They seemed to be growing on Cat, though, evident from the smile she tried to hide from her husband. She had always wanted a larger family, and now they inherited two teenagers—a seventeen-year-old centaur that acted thirty-seven, and a twenty-six-year-old porn photographer who behaved sixteen. Cal wasn’t sure if Cat’s acclimation was a good thing. His negative feelings about Seth had not subsided and were at best mixed. If it weren’t for Seth, they would not have lost their memories and spent the better part of the past decade unaware of their real identities. They would never have lost the prince, who had been put in Callum’s charge. Tristan might still be alive, as probably Ben Reyes and a score of others. The hardest point to resolve, though, the part that disturbed Callum to his core, was that he would never have married Catherine. He would never have pursued another woman if he were cognizant of his betrothal to Chryslantha. She was as much a part of him as his heart and lungs and he would have stayed true. But then his daughter, Brianna, whom he loved more than life itself, would never have existed. For all his incompetence, bellyaching, and pessimistic rhetoric, Seth was the reason Cal had his family.

  Cal once believed his love for Chryslantha was the most powerful force in the world, breakable only by death itself. Noble houses in the kingdom paired their offspring to gain land, status, and power; girls of fourteen betrothed to old men, couples with nothing in common except their parents’ desires to grow their holdings. His father was not enamored by the game despite the advantages that paired him with a wife twenty years younger, but Cal’s mother, Mina, was a different story. She was a master at the matchmaking art.

  Cal had been impressed with Chryslantha since they played as children. At seven, she looked like a princess but climbed trees like a squirrel and spit farther than a wharfie. Her father was wealthy—a duke with only an arm’s-length claim to Aandor’s seat of power. They had written to each other as children when family business took them to opposite ends of the kingdom. A union with Chryslantha would raise Callum’s status and land holdings considerably, but he was already in love with her before the first inkling of a match occurred to their parents. His friends taunted him, jealous that he valued her counsel over theirs … What kind of a man had a woman for a best friend? Chrys had more common sense than any of them; if she’d been a man, she would have been a force to be reckoned with at court, and she would still have been his closest friend.

  When Callum was sent to quell the Mourish queen’s rebellion at Gagarnoth, Chryslantha could not accept that he might die before she knew his love. The night before he embarked, she gave him her maidenhood, knowing full well the risks that it entailed. Callum had known women before Chryslantha, but it was different for men … they were expected to start young and be worldly in these matters. But had Callum changed his mind about marrying her she would have been scandalized—even if he died on the mission, her reputation would have suffered. Her father’s enemies would paint her as soiled and wanton. Because she had brothers to inherit the bulk of her father’s titles and lands, only families of lesser repute would have offered their sons for a union and they would leverage her shame to increase her dowry. Many poems had been written about the virtues of chastity—virginity was worth a woman’s weight in gold.

  Chrys gave Callum the silk garter she had worn while they made love, and knotted a small braid of her golden hair to it. I’ll try especially hard not to die, Cal had promised her, clutching the fetish as though it were worth more than all the jewels in the kingdom. For only in death did Cal imagine his life would not be spent with his beloved. He did not anticipate the consequences of a transuniversal expedition, skewed time lines, and incompetent wizards. Some impediments were too powerful for ordinary human love. And yet, he’d found love again. Was his bond with Catherine as fragile? The thought of losing Cat filled Cal with as much dread as confronting Chryslantha with the news of his marriage. He pulled the SUV into the town clerk’s parking lot with a mind in turmoil.

  “You kids stay here and practice,” Cal told his sorcerers. “We’ll check this out.”

  The town hall was an old wooden firetrap, and also served as post office, court, and records office.

  “At least it’s not made out of pink bricks like that other post office,” Cat said.

  “We’re lucky this place hasn’t burned down yet,” Cal responded.

  The floorboards creaked under Callum’s
weight, but not so much under his petite wife. There was a hint of mold mingled with old paper and dust in the air—the type of place you expected to find a long-lost manuscript from some long-dead, but brilliant, writer. A tired wooden counter barred admittance to the small office area behind it. A man in a white short-sleeved shirt, square buzz haircut, and about fifty extra pounds sat at the rear desk reading the morning paper. The woman was in her early forties with a bobbed hairstyle. Her name tag read Gloria Hauer.

  “Can I help you folks?” she asked.

  Callum flashed his NYPD badge. “I was wondering if I could look at your police records from about thirteen years ago?” Callum unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket. It was a printout of a short newspaper blurb that Cat had found online about an accident involving Galen and Linnea Ashe. The newspaper had long ago shuttered its office, a victim of the Internet era. “Is this the jurisdiction that responded to this incident?”

  The woman looked at the paper blandly. “Nope. This was in Wassaic. Sorry.”

  The man at the desk put down his paper and walked up to the front desk. His square puffy face, black horn-rimmed glasses, and pocket protector gave him the appearance of a NASA employee from the early 1960s. His tag said Hank Meier. He looked at the printout. “Well I’ll be darned, Glory. Yeah, this was us—there was another feller in here the other day asking about the same incident. Why so much interest in a decade-old pair of roadkills?”

  “I can’t talk about the case,” Callum said. A sinking feeling nestled in his gut. “What other fellow?”