But Reg knew there was more to it than that. Finding a cursed treasure was dramatic enough, but there had to be more to it.
Because Vivian hadn’t died. She hadn’t come down with some unusual illness and died within weeks of the tomb being plundered. She had not died when the lion had stolen into the camp and tried to drag her away. She hadn’t been killed in any of the incidents since then. Not when her house was crushed or when a truck came barreling down the street with her directly in its path.
Vivian had mentioned a wish. Be careful what you wish for…
“What did you wish?”
There was a long period of silence and Reg wondered whether Vivian were going to answer. She seemed to be half in a trance; able to answer Reg’s questions, but flat and distant, no emotion in her words.
“I wished… that I would be young forever. That I never had to get old and die.”
Vivian touched the cat pendant. A shadow passed over her face and, for a split-second, Reg saw an illusion. Vivian, her face wrinkled and ancient. Small and sunken and withered like a mummy. No flesh, just dried, wrinkled skin over a skull.
Reg gasped and blinked, and the illusion was gone. She was, once again, gazing at Vivian’s smooth, unblemished, unwrinkled face.
“When was that? How long ago?”
Vivian’s head moved from side to side. “Too long to count… I was just a little girl at the time. In Egypt…”
“You must know about how long ago it was. What year was it? What else was going on in the world?”
“I don’t know. I only knew my own little world… just my family, and whatever camp or village we were in.”
“You must have heard things on the TV or radio. Someone must have had a radio.”
Damon made a small noise. Reg looked at him, but he didn’t say anything. Reg looked back at Vivian. How old could she be? Detective Jessup said that Sarah was centuries old. Sarah said she had seen Vivian somewhere before. Vivian couldn’t be older than Sarah.
“There were no radios,” Vivian said. “No. Not for a long, long time.”
“Well… what about wars? Who was fighting? What kind of people were in Egypt?”
Vivian shook her head. “Egyptians. I never saw a white face. Never heard another language.”
Reg looked at Damon, hoping that he would help her. She had not done well in history in school. She’d never been able to keep everything straight and in order or to remember what happened in what years. But what Vivian described sounded far more ancient than anything she had learned about.
“But… back before… you know, BC, there were Romans in Egypt, weren’t there? She would have heard whatever they spoke.”
“Maybe not out in the desert,” Damon said. “In the big cities and trade centers, maybe, but if she was only living in small camps and villages out in the desert, she might have been very isolated. Even in modern times.”
“I don’t think… she’s modern,” Reg said quietly. She didn’t like discussing Vivian as if she weren’t right there in the room, but the Vivian they had talked to seemed very far away, and she didn’t react to their words unless they addressed her directly. Reg couldn’t get that ancient, wrinkled face out of her head. If that was how Vivian was supposed to look, if she had aged and died the way she was supposed to, then she had to be very old. More than a hundred. More than Sarah.
“Help me,” Vivian pled. Her pupils were still pinpricks. “Help me to break the curse.”
“You want the accidents to stop,” Reg agreed.
“No… No.”
“Do you know anything about breaking curses?” Reg asked Damon. “Ancient Egyptian curses?”
Damon shook his head. “No, I’m not the one to ask. That’s way outside my wheelhouse.”
“Who, then? Sarah? Corvin?”
“Maybe Sarah,” Damon said uncertainly. “But I’m not sure how much she will know… or remember. And Corvin, he only knows what he’s studied over the years. Maybe he’s come across something in some ancient scrolls, but… he’s not old enough to remember anything like that.”
Reg needed someone older. Someone who had been around not just for decades or centuries, but thousands of years.
Reg looked at Starlight, thinking it through, examining the idea from several angles before speaking.
“Then maybe… Harrison.”
Damon raised an eyebrow. He had met Harrison a couple of times briefly, but only knew as much about him and the others who claimed to be immortals as anyone else.
“He would know, right?” Reg asked.
“Maybe. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better. But you’d have to get him to come here, and then to explain what it is that you want from him, and then to get him to do it…” Damon trailed off.
And he was right, of course. Talking to Harrison was one thing; actually communicating with him and getting him to do something helpful was quite another.
“Harrison?” Reg repeated. She focused on how he had looked the last time she had seen him, happily eating ribs with Starlight.
And there was another connection with Starlight. If Starlight was connected with Harrison, and was somehow connected with Vivian or the pendant, then what did that tell Reg about him? Harrison had referred to Starlight as an old friend.
How old?
“Is it a party?” Harrison asked. “I didn’t bring a gift.”
Reg opened her eyes and looked at Harrison, standing behind Starlight. He was wearing a bright red satiny shirt and played with his luxurious mustache while he looked at her, smiling.
“Don’t play games with me,” Reg said. “You can make a gift appear whenever you like. You don’t have to bring it with you.”
“This is true,” Harrison agreed, nodding sagely. He looked around. “But if it is a party, there should be cake.”
And there was, on the kitchen island. A beautiful black forest cake with curls of dark chocolate and bright red cherries and mounds of creamy icing. Reg’s mouth began to water. She tried to remind her body that it was first thing in the morning and she hadn’t even finished her coffee yet. She certainly wasn’t ready to dig into a big chocolate cake. She shook her head at Harrison.
“What’s with the obsession with food?” she demanded.
Harrison shrugged. “It is one of the few pleasures in taking on a human body.”
Reg supposed he had a point there. “Well… you can have some cake in a minute. First… I need some help.”
Harrison looked around again, studying Damon and then Vivian. “You do not appear to be in any danger.”
“No, I’m not.” Unless Vivian’s bad luck were to strike while she was still in Reg’s cottage. She didn’t feel like being crushed by a boulder or tree or blown to kingdom come. “It’s a problem with a client. We wanted to know… how to break the curse that is on her.” Reg gestured to Vivian.
Harrison looked at Vivian again. “What curse?”
“Can’t you see it? She’s been cursed with…” Reg felt a little ridiculous putting it into words. “Staying young and living forever.”
“I thought this was mankind’s ultimate wish.”
“Well… I guess it was Vivian’s wish… but she doesn’t want it anymore. She wants to live a normal life. All of these terrible things keep happening around her because… I guess… fate knows that she should have been dead a long time ago.”
Harrison nodded. “Of course.”
“Well… she doesn’t want those things to keep happening. She wants to just be a normal human being, with a normal length of life.”
“She cannot. She has already far surpassed that.”
“Well, I mean, from now. For her to just live a normal human lifespan after today.”
Harrison scratched his head, thinking about this. “I do not know,” he said slowly.
“You can do anything. You’re immortal.”
“Immortal isn’t the same as omnipotent,” Damon reminded Reg. “There may be a lot of things that your Uncle Harrison can do, but he can’t do anything.”
Reg scowled. “As far as I am concerned, he can do anything.”
Harrison smiled sunnily. “You see?” he said to Damon. “That’s why she is my goddaughter.”
“She isn’t.”
“Well, she could be.”
“Guys, guys,” Reg waved her hands at them. “Cut it out. Harrison. Can you remove the curse?”
“It is not a curse,” he corrected. “It is a granted wish.”
“Then can you remove the granted wish?”
He shook his head slowly. “One cannot remove a granted wish. It is already granted.”
“She doesn’t want to be immortal.”
“She is not.”
“If she stays young and lives forever, then she is immortal,” Reg insisted. She looked at Damon. “Right? I got it right that time?”
“Yeah. That’s kind of the definition of immortal,” Damon informed Harrison.
Harrison tsked and brushed this off with a hand motion. “She is human. She is not one of my kind.”
“Maybe not, but she’s still immortal, and she doesn’t want to be anymore. She wants to age normally and then die at the end of her lifespan.”
Harrison looked at Vivian. He shook his head again, as if they were being silly. “She does not want that.”
“Tell him, Vivian,” Reg told the woman, who was just sitting there like a statue as they discussed her fate.
“No,” Vivian said, stone-faced.
Reg sat there with her mouth open.
Harrison nodded at Reg and folded his arms over his chest. “You see? She does not want that.”
“Vivian.” Reg stared into Vivian’s eyes, trying to connect with her to make sure that she understood what Reg was saying. “Vivian. You asked me to help you. I’m trying to help you. But you have to tell Harrison that it’s what you want. You want to age and live a normal life, right? That’s what you said.”
Vivian shook her head slowly. Her pupils grew slightly so that Reg hoped she was coming out of the trance and could communicate more clearly. “I don’t want to age,” she said. “I don’t want to live a normal lifespan.”
“But you said…”
“I want to die.”
Reg stared at her. “What?”
Vivian blinked a few times, her eyes growing more normal. She looked down at Starlight, and then up over her shoulder at the gangly, brightly-dressed Harrison.
“I can’t keep living like this, plodding through life year after year after year. All of these near-death encounters. It’s like life is taunting me. I want to die. I want it to finally be over.”
“But you said you wanted to live a normal life.”
“Is my life normal? If you stood in the path of a speeding truck, would it swerve around you at the last moment?” Vivian demanded. “Because of a little rock in the road? You told me that if I did not want to die, I needed to step out of the path of the truck. But you were wrong. I didn’t step out of the path, and it didn’t kill me. And neither did the lion, or the boulder, or the airplane, or the bomb, or the tornado…”
Reg looked for something to say. “But you just want those things to stop happening, don’t you? Just to…”
“I don’t need them to stop. If they do stop, I don’t care, as long as I can put a pistol to my head and pull the trigger!”
“You see?” Harrison asked reasonably. “She does not want—”
“Yes, I get it,” Reg snapped. “You were right. I get it. But she does want the curse to be removed. The wish. She wants it taken away.”
“She wants to die,” Harrison said, shaking his head slightly. “You have rules. You do not want me to kill your friends or to do anything that results in their deaths.”
“No,” Reg agreed slowly, trying to feel her way through his argument. “I don’t want that… normally… but Vivian isn’t a friend, she is a client, and she came to me because she wants the granted wish removed. So that she can die if she wants to.”
Harrison wandered over to the cake and stuck his finger into the icing. He scooped out a generous amount of icing and stuck his finger in his mouth.
“Harrison…”
“Maybe she hasn’t tried hard enough,” Harrison suggested.
“Tried hard enough to what? To kill herself?”
He nodded.
“I think she’s tried hard enough,” Reg said. “Did you hear about all of the things she has been through? And I’m sure there are plenty more she hasn’t even mentioned.”
“Accidents,” Harrison pointed out. “That’s not trying.”
Reg looked at Vivian, at a loss for words. Vivian looked at Harrison, her brows drawn down.
“Who are you, anyway? And who are you to say that I haven’t tried? I’ve done everything I could to die. Poison. Jumping off a bridge. Shooting or stabbing myself. Getting other people to shoot me… you don’t know how many different things I have tried, and it never works.”
Harrison nodded. He looked through Reg’s drawers and eventually found a large serving fork, which he used to cut a wedge of cake. He ate it off of the fork, shoving it messily into his mouth. He stood there wiping the icing off of his face with his finger and then licking his finger off like a cat.
Reg looked down at Starlight. “Harrison…”
“Yeph?”
“Who is Starlight? Is he an immortal like you?”
Harrison considered the question for a moment. Reg could guess what he was going to say before it came out of his mouth. The only thing he could say to muddy the waters even further.
“Not like me, no.”
“Is he an immortal?”
Harrison rubbed his thumb over his lip, looking down at his furry friend. “He is a cat.”
“I know that. But is he an immortal that has taken cat form, like you take human form?”
“Not like me—”
“Oh, you are the most irritating… Is he a real cat?”
Harrison nodded. “Most definitely.”
“Has he always been a cat?”
“Always?” Harrison stared off into space. “Always… no.”
“What was he before he was a cat?”
Harrison closed his eyes momentarily, grimacing like he was coming down with a migraine. “Humans have such a narrow view of temporal time…”
Reg fixed her eyes on Starlight, trying to hold his gaze. She could feel his emotions. She couldn’t interpret his thoughts into English language, but she understood his feelings and what he wanted. Usually.
“Star, can you help me? Can you do something here? She is wearing a cat necklace, and she wished on it, and you have… some kind of connection with her. Do you know her? From… before? Sometime? Somewhere?”
He gazed back at her. How did she expect him to answer such a complex thought? Even if he did, how would he answer it with a single thought or emotion?
“Can you change her? Can you…” Reg had been about to ask if he could take the wish away, but Harrison had already said that the wish, once granted, couldn’t be taken away. It was, if Reg understood, in the past, and that could not change. But Harrison had taken her into the past before and things had changed. Maybe it was more than that. One of those rules that the immortals were not supposed to break. No takesie backsies on wishes. “Can you change her wish?”
Starlight cocked his head at Reg. She always thought it was so cute when he tried to figure something out and tilted his head to the side like that when curious or puzzled.
“Come on, Starlight,” she encouraged. “Can you change Vivian’s wish?”
He looked at Vivian. Vivian shifted away slightly, still uncertain about the cat.
Starlight jumped up into her lap.