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  IGNITION

  You have the Musings of Merlin Series. Why stop there?

  When Gwen Cooper’s best friend is kidnapped by a mysterious stranger on a trip to England, Gwen gathers her courage and follows her into an extraordinary Otherworld. As Gwen navigates the wilds of the primeval forest and the enchanting fires of faerie people, she finds clues to her past and the mother who abandoned her—discoveries which challenge her to embrace and wield her own hidden powers to save her friend.

  “Captivating and enchanting.”

  - Amazon Reviewer

  Get the first quarter of Mark of the Breenan today!

  IGNITION

  MUSINGS OF MERLIN SERIES

  EMMA SHELFORD

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  IGNITION

  All rights reserved.

  Kinglet Books

  Victoria BC, Canada

  Copyright © 2015 Emma Shelford

  Cover design by Christien Gilston

  ISBN-10: 1511902817

  ISBN-13: 978-1511902816

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  www.emmashelford.com

  First edition: May 2015

  DEDICATION

  For Steven

  My inspiration, my enabler, and my sounding-board

  PROLOGUE

  Time. It rules our lives, ticking away the seconds, minutes, hours of our days. It’s time to get up, time to leave, time to return. Suffering can stretch minutes into eons, and happiness can exist for only a heartbeat, yet stay with us for all time. From a baby’s first angry wail to an old man’s last sighing breath, our lives are subject to the coursing river of time. The only certainty of life is that everyone’s time on Earth will end.

  Everyone, that is, except me.

  Time passes for me as it does for everyone else. It’s just that I have seen so much more of it pass. For over fifteen hundred years I’ve walked this Earth, never dying, never aging. I’m waiting for someone to return. He was first my student, then my brother-in-arms, and finally my friend. They say he’ll be back one day when he’s needed again, and I promised that I’d wait for him to return. He’ll need my help when he arrives. I’m pretty useful.

  My name is Merlin, and this is one chapter in the story of my life.

  CHAPTER I

  I’m at my psychologist’s office for the first time. Yes, I just started seeing a shrink. I’ve tried everything else in this world—why not get my head examined? Of course, the poor woman won’t know what hit her once I open up. She’s used to dealing with divorcées and troubled kids, not centuries-old magicians with abandonment issues and more baggage than would fit in an aircraft carrier.

  Of course, I doubt I’ll fill her in on the whole story. She’d laugh in my face—I’ve seen it before—although she might hide it behind a professional mask of genial understanding. If she thought I was serious, she’d likely urge me to check in for psychiatric examination. I don’t look centuries-old. Thirty, give or take.

  More likely I’ll give her a condensed version—just enough drama to comfortably fit into one lifetime. We’ll see how much the woman can handle. My life can be too difficult for regular people. It can be too difficult for me sometimes, and I’ve lived it.

  I wonder how long the sessions will last, since half the things I tell her will have to be fabricated. She even has problems right off the bat with my name.

  “Please sit down, Mr.—” She looks down at her notepad, and pulls a lock of shoulder-length brown hair behind one ear with a nervous twitch. “Lytton. My name is Dr. Minnie Dilleck. May I call you—” She squints at her notes again. “Merry?”

  She’s definitely new at her job. That’s my fault for picking the youngest, prettiest female psychologist in Vancouver, B.C. Not that it’s a problem—I came for the experience of being in therapy, not to delve deeply into my psyche. I might as well enjoy the scenery along the way.

  “Yes, of course. And before you ask, yes, Merry like the hobbit.” Although I came up with the name long before Tolkien ever dreamed of Middle Earth. I make it a game with myself to choose names similar to my true name. Depending on the country I’m living in at the time, this can be difficult or easy. Merry Lytton is my nom du jour. Given my tanned complexion and black-brown hair, cut short for this time, it’s not difficult to fit in wherever I please. And I’ve always had a flair for languages, especially after centuries of practice. It’s easy to slide completely into whatever persona I’ve chosen. I’m eminently adaptable.

  “Am I supposed to lay down on the couch now?” I flop onto the surprisingly uncomfortable couch covered in gray faux-suede, swinging my legs up and resting my ankles on the armrest.

  “If—if you’re more comfortable that way, by all means.” She looks a little flustered at my teasing. I take my fun where I can, so sue me. The experience will be good for her. Builds character, as my mother was fond of saying long ago. So very, very long ago.

  “So, Merry.” Dr. Dilleck smooths her pencil skirt over her thighs. The glass coffee table between us houses a bowl of oranges and a discreet box of tissues. “Let’s talk about you. Merry is an interesting name. Is it short for something?”

  “It’s short for Marybel, actually,” I say. Her eyes widen and her hand grips her pen more securely. I relent. “Only joking. Don’t look so worried.”

  “If your name were Marybel, it would be perfectly all right with me,” she says. I raise my eyebrows. Perhaps the little mouse has a spine. This might be interesting after all.

  “So, Merry, what brought you here? Is there anything in particular you’d like to discuss?”

  Hmm. Good question. Luckily, I have my answer ready.

  “I fight off and on with depression, and I’ve never come to anyone to deal with it. I thought maybe it was time. I’m feeling good now, you understand, but it always comes back. I figure it can’t hurt to explore a bit.”

  She’s nodding before I finish.

  “It’s great that you’re here, Merry. Good for you. It takes courage to face your inner demons. Now you have help—we can face them together.”

  I settle in for the hour. We talk for a while about what happens when I get depressed—I sleep, mainly, because it’s not as if I need to worry about wasting my life away—and how I improve my mood. I don’t have high hopes that anything will come of this. It’s not depression as people today classify it, brain chemistry gone haywire. It’s simply too many layers of loss, and sometimes grief gets the better of me. There’s not much this doctor can do about it. That’s okay. She has a very calming voice, and her eyes are large with pale gray irises—quite mesmerizing.

  “Do you find there is a trigger, some way to release you from your depression?”

  Air puffs out of my nose in a mirthless chuckle.

  “I try to remember that someone might need me, someday.”

  “That’s good. Try to hold onto that.” She nods before continuing. “Do you have any family? A significant other?”

  I stare at the ceiling. Did she really have to go there? I guess I should have expected it. Oh well, I can give her some real fodder to work with.

  “Family long since dead. Never knew my father. No children. My wife,” my most recent wife, that is, “died years ago also. Honestly, I’d rather not talk about it.” There’s the truth. It’s only taken me thirty years to move on from Josephine’s death. I swear, each time a woman I love dies, it gets harder. />
  “Okay.” Her voice is soothing and low. “Whenever you’re ready. There’s no rush.” I glance over to see her biting her lip and looking down at her notes. She’s obviously itching to ask more but is professional enough to respect my wishes. I almost feel bad denying her. Maybe I should throw her a bone.

  “I guess I should tell you—I have very strange dreams.”

  She sits up straighter.

  “Oh?”

  I try not to smile.

  “I keep reliving my past. They’re very vivid dreams. More like memories, really.” I used to dream properly when I was younger, the usual nonsense about talking horses and flying castles and other bizarre things. Now, though, I’m only visited by the ghosts of my past. The intense memories fill me with joy and plague me with sorrow and guilt.

  “Dreams can be very important parts of our subconscious. Often our brains are processing things in the night that we don’t want to deal with consciously. May I suggest you start a dream journal? In fact, journaling in general can be very beneficial.”

  She’s about to ask more when I notice the clock strike three.

  “Oops, looks like we’re done here.” I swing my legs to the ground and push to my feet with alacrity. That’s just about enough soul-searching for today. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  She almost looks a little disappointed.

  “Yes, of course. Well, it was wonderful to meet you, Merry. I think we made some progress here today. I’d love to see you back here soon.”

  We’ll see. I smile noncommittally and say goodbye.

  ***

  A few hours later, I cross the quad at the university where I work. One would think I could retire after fifteen hundred years in the workforce, but I doubt social security has figured out the paperwork for an eternity of pension benefits.

  And besides, what would I do all day? Play golf? It’s not as if I need to rest. I have the body and vigor of a thirty-year-old man, and a brain filled with centuries of knowledge and experience. Honestly, it’s a relief to do something. It helps me avoid long contemplative introspection. Makes me wonder why I’m starting these shrink sessions, although I do enjoy talking about myself, which I’m rarely able to do.

  “Hey, Merry! Wait up!”

  To my left, a pretty girl lopes toward me across the grass, her long, slender legs in their tiny butt-hugging shorts dodging the clusters of sprawling students in her way. Her black hair swishes around her shoulders and sweeps forward as she falls into place beside me, her face beaming.

  “Hi, Jen,” I say. Jennifer Chan took one of my classes a few years ago—a translation course focusing on Old English texts, mainly pre-Norman Saxon. She was by far the brightest student in my class, an absolute prodigy at languages of all sorts. She’d come with great questions, and we would often fall into long conversations after class. We struck up a friendship once exams finished and prying eyes in the department were satisfied that the teacher-student relationship was dissolved. Not that I feel anything more than friendship for Jen, surprisingly. She’s a beautiful girl, all slender limbs without sacrificing curves in the right places, with a pleasant oval face from her Asian father and large, friendly eyes gifted by her Danish mother.

  If I do have a weakness, it’s for women. It’s got me into plenty of trouble in the past, more than I care to admit. I may have a centuries-old mind, but the rest of me hasn’t caught up. But Jen feels off-limits, somehow. It’s refreshing, actually, to be friends with a woman without lust taking the driver’s seat. As far as Jen is concerned, I’m simply a young sessional instructor at the university who’s not much older than her. Hah.

  I’m still not sure why she befriended me so readily. Perhaps it was our shared interest in language and history, and she wanted conversations with a little more depth than her circle of friends could give her. Or maybe she can tell I’m different, and who isn’t attracted to something new and exciting? Whatever the reason, I’m not complaining. Friends don’t come my way often enough, and I don’t want to analyze this one.

  “You look pretty peppy for exam season.” It’s true—Jen always has a bounce in her step, a physical release of her natural joie de vivre, but today she is positively springy.

  “All done! Mandarin yesterday and ancient Hebrew this morning. The rest were last week. I totally aced them all, of course.” She winks at me. She isn’t very good at winking—her eyes sort of squint simultaneously—but it’s endearing, and I get the message.

  “I would expect nothing less from my finest pupil.” I give her a one-armed hug. “Nice work. So does this mean you’re done? As in degree, long robes, silly hat?”

  “You better believe it!”

  “Well, congrats. That’s big news. I, on the other hand, have a huge pile of marking to do. Where your work ends, mine begins.”

  “Poor, long-suffering Merry. All those terrible essays. Never mind all that. You can buy me coffee tomorrow to celebrate my accomplishments and distract yourself from the drudgery of marking.”

  I laugh.

  “I guess that’s fair.” We walk in companionable silence for a few moments until Jen checks her watch.

  “Oops, got to run. I have an interview for an interpreter job that starts next week.” She rolls her eyes. “My dad set it up. The firm is run by an old buddy of his, so I’ll probably get the job no matter what. But it doesn’t hurt to be on time.” Jen’s father is the CEO of a very large, very successful corporation headquartered in Vancouver, with satellite offices all over the world. I know it bothers Jen to take advantage of her father’s position, but it’s hard to turn down the opportunities she’s afforded.

  “See you tomorrow. Come by my office at ten,” I say. She waves goodbye and strides across the grass to the bus loop. She doesn’t notice that she’s walking straight into the middle of a Frisbee game. When she reaches the center of the grassy boulevard, the whirling disk spins directly toward her head. Without thinking, I tweak the lauvan surrounding Jen. The Frisbee bounces harmlessly off the air above her head and skitters across the grass. Jen doesn’t even break stride.

  Soul-searching with the psychologist left a bitter taste in my mouth, only momentarily alleviated by Jen’s buoyant presence. I’m tired, the weight of memories threatening to pull me under the surface. My face lifts toward the sun in an attempt to banish ghosts. I don’t have much luck.

  I continue to walk across campus, deciding against marking any more today, and enter an outdoor breezeway to get to the car park. On the right wall hangs a poster for a Harry Potter movie marathon at the campus theater. My head shakes and my mouth twitches upward involuntarily. People nowadays love the idea of magic, at least around here. It’s all wands and sparks and mind control. No one believes it, of course, except maybe the hopeful kiddies jumping off their beds on kitchen brooms. It’s simply blissful escapism. I can understand that. It’s much better than the witch hunts in the sixteenth century, or the lynchings and burnings in certain parts of the world today.

  The thing is, magic doesn’t exist. Not like that, anyway. The only person I’ve ever seen do anything out of the ordinary is me. And it’s not wizard fire and “you shall not pass.”

  What I do is more—how do I describe it? It’s as if there’s a layer of extra matter around everything that is invisible to everyone. But to me, the layer appears as a vast covering of translucent, interconnected threads woven around anything that has inherent energy. A fire has plenty of threads, as does a rock flying through the air. A rock sitting on the ground, though, doesn’t have much in the thread department, although if it’s an igneous rock it may have a few leftover threads from its fiery birth in a volcanic eruption. I call these threads lauvan, which means “rope” in my native tongue—a language nobody speaks anymore.

  Living things, especially, have an abundance of lauvan. In humans, they’re an extension of the body, but also of the spirit. It’s complicated. If the human body is like Earth, then the lauvan are the atmosphere around it. The atmos
phere can’t be seen except by a precious few astronauts, but without it, the Earth would be a barren, lifeless void. So too with the lauvan. The lauvan help make us who we are, and when we die, our lauvan unravel and dissolve into nothingness. They are an extension of energy from the physical body, what gives it animation. The soul, if you will.

  As I said, it’s complicated. I’ve had centuries to think about it, and that’s the best explanation I can muster. It doesn’t help that I’m the only one I’ve ever known who is like me, so there’s no one to ask. I’ve certainly looked. Any vague rumor of magic or sorcery used to have me running to examine the hopefuls, but no one could ever see the lauvan. I gave up after the eleventh century.

  Not only can I see the lauvan, I can touch them if I wish to. Manipulating the lauvan affects the physical world—when I pulled at Jen’s lauvan, I prevented the Frisbee from slamming into her head. It’s certainly useful, and I’ve had a lot of time to be inventive.

  My car waits for me in the car park. It’s a dark blue Lotus Elise. I should really have something more inconspicuous, although in a city rampant with Ferraris and Maseratis, mine doesn’t stand out as much as one might expect. I’ve taken the glamorous route in the past, but the less noticeable I make my life, the longer I can stay in one place. I have the money—it’s not hard to make it when you’re as resourceful and experienced as I am—but to keep my cover, I can’t show off too much. This city is comfortable for the moment, and I don’t want to leave it right now. But the car was too hard to resist. I’ve always loved the rush of speed even from my days on horseback, and the luxury of a fast car is an indulgence I’m not willing to forgo.