"Pardon me," he said in a thick French accent, leaning in front of me and pushing the button to the floor just beneath Kingsley's offices. "Wrong floor."
The elevator doors opened immediately, and he stepped out. As he did so, he turned and looked at me again. He was a tall man wearing a bow tie. I hadn't noticed the bow tie before. His age was indeterminate, anything from 48 to 78. Then he did something that shocked the hell out of me.
He smiled.
The elevator doors closed and I headed up to see Kingsley.
Chapter Nineteen
Like I said, the last time I was here, I stormed Kingsley's office like a mad woman.
Or a desperate mom.
This time I waited patiently in the lobby while Kingsley finished up with a client. Oh, I was still desperate. I was still driven. It's just that I had eased up on the panic button. A few days ago, when I had stormed in here, my son was close to death. Now he was very much alive, although I was faced with a whole new dilemma.
Had I been anything less than what I am now, my son, I knew, would be dead. He would have fulfilled his life mission, a mission that included checking out early, apparently, and the rest of us would have been left to pick up the pieces of our own lives, if that was even possible.
There were a lot of unanswered questions. The use of the medallion was so vague, so strange, and just so damn weird. That I was pinning my son's eternity on a golden coin hanging from a leather strap was mind-boggling and disturbing, at best.
And what was I working so hard for? To ensure that my son would someday die? Where things stood, he would survive and keep surviving forever. Wasn't that a good thing? And how did I know that he would stop growing? Maybe he would continue to grow. Maybe he would reach adulthood. Maybe he would thank me every day for the rest of his life, for all eternity, for sparing him from death, and for giving him great physical gifts, too. Knowing my son, in the least, he would thank me for getting him out of school.
This line of thinking had me confused. Jesus, maybe I should let him be. Maybe with proper guidance, I could walk him through the eternal experience, help him, teach him, guide him. Something no one had done for me. Maybe he would indeed grow into his adult body.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
I didn't know; I knew so little.
Shit.
A few minutes later, Kingsley's office door opened and out came a familiar client. The same client I had seen just days earlier. The same client who had prompted a powerful vision of him strangling his wife to death in her sleep. The same coward. The same piece of shit. The same asshole I had threatened to bring down.
It was no threat.
And here he was. Coming out of Kingsley's office.
Again.
We locked eyes and I think we both gasped. My stomach heaved at the sight of the bastard. He made a small, whimpering sound and took a step back...into Kingsley, who was standing behind him. Kingsley looked surprised, too. He also looked a little sheepish and embarrassed. I was too stunned to speak.
Kingsley quickly stepped between us, and actually escorted the bastard out of his office. A moment later, my werewolf friend returned, all six foot, six inches of him, and gestured toward his office.
"Let's talk," he said.
Numb and sick, I silently stood and headed through his open door.
He followed behind, shutting the door.
"Have a seat," he said.
Chapter Twenty
I did as I was told, still too stunned to speak.
Kingsley moved around his office with an ease and speed uncommon for a man his size. He sat in his executive chair and studied me for a long moment before speaking. I could not look into his eyes.
"Well, I suppose I should thank you for not playing Whack-A-Mole with my client's head," he finally said, and I could hear the gentle humor in his voice. He was referring to an inadvertent joke he'd made the other day.
I didn't smile. Not now.
He took in a lot of air. Unlike me, Kingsley seemed to need normal amounts of oxygen. I know this because I had listened to him snore once or twice. Listened, of course, was putting it mildly. Experienced, perhaps? His snoring was unlike anything I had ever heard before. It sounded like the bombing of a small village.
He filled his massive chest to capacity, which put a lot of pressure on his nice dress shirt, especially the buttons. I was prepared to duck should buttons start flying like so many bullets from a Gatling gun.
He studied me like that for a moment, his chest filled, button threads hanging on for dear life, and then finally expelled. He leaned back and crossed his legs, adjusting the drape of his hem.
"Don't judge me, Sam," he said. I noticed he looked away when he spoke.
"Who's judging?" I said. "I'm just admiring the fine handiwork of your shirt."
"Every man deserves a fair trial, Sam."
"And every defense attorney deserves a hefty payday."
"This has nothing to do with money, Sam."
"Say that to your mansion in Yorba Linda."
"My home is the result of a lot of hard work."
"And a lot of freed killers."
Perhaps in frustration, he closed both hands into boulder-like fists, and as he did so, his knuckles cracked mightily. Jesus, he was an intimidating son-of-a-bitch, but I was not easily intimidated.
"What do you want, Sam?" he asked.
I found myself wanting to lash out, too. I found myself wanting to storm out and flip him the bird. How...how could a man represent such scum? And how could I ever respect such a man?
The answer was easy: I couldn't.
I continued saying nothing. I just sat there, battling my emotions, knowing that Kingsley might be the only person I knew who could help me find Archibald Maximus, but hating that I needed his help.
And in my silence, Kingsley must have spotted something. His thick eyebrows knitted and he sat forward a little. "Unbelievable," he said.
"What?"
"You did it, didn't you?"
"Did what?" But I knew what he was talking about. Kingsley was closed to me, as were all immortals, apparently, but we both were experts in reading body language.
"You turned him, Sam, didn't you?"
"I saved him."
He looked away, shaking his great head. "And you have the nerve to come in here and accuse me of being selfish. You, who condemned your own son to an eternity of childhood."
"What was I supposed to do, goddammit? Watch him die?"
"There's a natural order to things, Sam."
"And we're not natural?"
"No, we're not."
"And part of that natural order is to let my son die?"
He said nothing, but I saw his brain working. The great attorney was looking for a counter-argument, but I would be damned if I was going to listen to an argument for my son's death.