The autumn wind battered against the windows of the manor house, ripping the last of the leaves from the trees and pushing tiny waves across the lake to splash against the neatly manicured lawn. Beneath the rippling waters, Remiel could just make out the twisted remains of the underwater billiards room that had been destroyed in the fight between her, Oliver, and Zedekiah. Three weeks had passed since then and she idly wondered if Zedekiah had any intention of repairing the structures under the lake, or if they would be left to decay beneath the water, a mute reminder of his failure. 

She heard the paneled door open behind her and turned. Zedekiah stooped in the doorway, leaning on silver-tipped ebony cane, dressed as immaculately as always. 

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here after all you have done,” he said in a voice as smooth and cold as dry ice.

“And yet you agreed to meet me.”

“Perhaps I invited you here to entrap you. There are some among our kind who would willingly give their own souls to see a traitor such as you destroyed.”

“Are you one of them?”

Zedekiah curled his mouth into a cruel imitation of a smile and strode across the worn carpet of the room to settle in a wide chair upholstered in rich, black leather. Remiel noted that, though he still carried the cane, he moved with the same ease as before their confrontation beneath the lake. She wondered if he had succeeded in regenerating this incarnation after being shot repeatedly in the chest and drowned, or if he had merely chosen to take the same form upon creating a new body for himself.

“I had considered it, but I prefer to take the long view of matters. Oliver Lucas is a threat today and, if we do not contain him, will quite possibly prove to be the greatest danger to our order since the Illuminati, but he is a mortal and will no doubt die one day. How soon that day will come, well...” he shrugged his narrow shoulders and lay the cane across his lap. “...That would depend on how much of a nuisance he makes of himself. You, on the other hand, are one of the Watchers. We are far more rare and valuable than the humans we guard.”

Remiel nodded and, keeping an eye on the open doorway and the cane on Zedekiah’s lap, stepped to the writing desk beside the window and perched on the edge. She kept her face carefully composed to hide her distaste at the implications of Zedekiah’s words. 

“Containment is exactly what I am here to discuss.”

Zedekiah nodded, but said nothing.

“You may know that Oliver retrieved the shard that Mímir hid beneath the roots of Yggdrasil.”

“That is not a surprise, considering what I learned from mister Gower.”

Remiel nodded. Upon returning to Britain she had sought out Gower and learned that he had disappeared. He returned to his flat and his position at the British Museum several days later, but had refused to speak with her.

“Did you aid him in that effort?”

“It would be better to say that I did not hinder him. Oliver Lucas is a remarkable man, Zedekiah.”

“And yet he is just a man. He is expendable, Remiel, if it serves the greater good of God’s will for humanity.”

“He has six shards now, Zedekiah. That is as many as the entire Illuminati organization managed to gather in half a century, and he has captured them all himself, some from the original locations, some from the remote locations where we hid them. He is half way to reassembling the mechanism, and he still doesn’t even know what it really is.”

“I was under the impression that you did not want me to have him killed.”

“Oliver has spent the last week scattering the shards across America. I do not know where they all are, but I did instruct him in how to reduce their effect. They are hidden in small towns, far away from one another and from large cities. In fact, they are less of a threat now than when Oliver had them all locked away in a couple banks in Virginia. So, now Oliver wants to return home, as does his cousin, who went into hiding after Oliver escaped from you. He is concerned for both her and the rest of his family, not to mention his own life, so he has asked me to offer you a deal.”

Zedekiah tapped a finger on the head of his cane and narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.

“If you swear to leave Oliver and his family untouched, he will leave the shards scattered and make no attempt to reassemble them. In effect, he claims, they are merely being moved from one hiding place to another, possibly more secure location.”

She stopped speaking and waited for Zedekiah to respond, but he remained impassive. Only the slow tap of a finger on the tip of his cane and an occasional blink of his eyes betrayed him as more than a wax figure.

Eventually, Remiel said, “He won’t promise to stop looking for the shards, but he says that he will not attempt to assemble them without my assistance and permission.”

“Preposterous. All you have told me of this so called deal is that Oliver Lucas gets exactly what he wants and we get nothing but an unpredictable mortal stumbling across the playing field, ready to unleash chaos without warning. I believe this meeting is at an end.”

He swung the cane down and prepared to leaver himself out of the chair with it.

“No, Zedekiah, it isn’t,” Remiel said in a soft tone. She slipped from the desk and took a step towards him. “Oliver is no fool. He has connections in both the relic underground and the American government. If anything happens to him, or to his family, two of the shards will be removed from their vaults and delivered to his contacts, along with copies of all his research notes and a list of the locations of the other shards.” She took another step forward and glared down at Zedekiah. “If you kill Oliver, or harm his family, the shards will be at greater risk than they have been at any time in the last thousand years.”

“You are aiding this mortal in overthrowing millennia of work!” Zedekiah snarled, leaping to his feet and slamming the tip of his cane into the floorboards. “If we do not regulate their development, if we do not contain the influence of the shards, humanity will destroy itself.”

“I am no longer convinced that you are the wisest judge of that,” Remiel whispered. “Now, do we have a deal?”

She looked up into Zedekiah’s burning eyes, silently calling on the power within her, preparing to defend herself in the event that he attacked. But she could see defeat written in his face. His lips contorted into a cruel, bloodless smile and he said, “Oliver will be safe from us. You have my word.”

“Swear it on the heartwood.”

“That what?”

“The olive wood pendant that we took from Oliver when he was your guest. Do you still have it?”

Zedekiah hesitated for the briefest moment, then nodded. 

“Place your hand upon it and swear that Oliver and his family will be safe.”

“I don’t have it with me. Do you think I carry confiscated relics around in my pockets? Oh, yes, right here I have a genuine ark of the covenant, and there in my left pocket is one of the Dead Sea scrolls.”

Remiel shook her head, just enough that he could see. She had expected as much, but hoped that she was wrong. Zedekiah must have truly been corrupted, else he would have seen the pendant as a holy relic and carried it for himself at all times. At least, she knew that was what she would have done.

She turned away from Zedekiah and strode to the door with measured steps, her footsteps echoing in the silence. Just as she lay her had on the doorknob, Zedekiah called out to her, “Do not bother to return, Remiel. The next time I see you, I will kill you.”

She pulled the door open and slipped out without a word.

Oliver Lucas sat alone at the counter of a roadside diner along Interstate 55, a hundred and fifty miles south of Saint Louis, Missouri, reading an e-mail from Remiel about her meeting with Zedekiah. The booths by the windows were occupied by a mix of locals, who seemed occupied in gossiping about one of the managers at the nearby metalworks, and travelers like himself. Half way between Memphis and Saint Louis, this place was the perfect watering hole for weary drivers.

Oliver finished reading a message from Remiel and smiled. They had been in contact by encrypted e-mail over the last week, but he had cautiously avoided telling her where he was. Now, with the six shards he possessed tucked away in the vaults of small banks across America, a detailed log of his research stored on multiple servers across the internet, and a dead man’s switch e-mail prepared to blast messages to all of his contacts in both the relic trade and the government, Oliver was relieved to learn that he could let his guard down, if only a little.

He replied to Remiel with a simple, “Thanks, I’ll be in touch.” 

Oliver set his phone down on the countertop, and turned his attention to the half finished plate of waffles in front of him. It had been too long, he reflected, since he had last driven the winding roadways of the American west. Maybe I’ll take some time off from this business and do some traveling, take a few photos of American life, he thought. The idea brought a sad smile to his face, because Oliver knew that it was impossible. He had started in on this quest when he was only nineteen and first found his uncle’s journals hidden in the attic. Now, after so many years, and so much work, he was just starting to understand what he was facing.

A pretty waitress stepped up to the counter and flashed Oliver a smile as sweet as the syrup on his pancakes. “You need anything else, darling?” she asked. 

Oliver shook is head and turned his mouth up in a weary half grin. “No thanks. I’m just trying to decide where to go next.”

“Sure a slice of apple pie wouldn’t help you decide?”

Oliver laughed and pushed his empty plate towards her. He shook his head, smiled, and said, “You know, it might just.”

She swept away with his plate and Oliver picked up his phone to send a message to Amber, letting her know it was safe to return home. When the waitress returned with a large, steaming slice of pie, Oliver returned her warm smile and thanked her. 

“No problem that can’t be worked out over some good pie,” she said. “Except maybe those what need a scoop of ice cream on top. At least, that’s what my daddy always told me.”

“He was a wise man,” Oliver replied, speaking around a mouthful of hot apple and buttery, flaky crust. 

The waitress moved off to another customer and Oliver continued eating his pie. There was time enough to decide what to do next, he determined. If there was one thing he had learned beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, it was the importance of acting with wisdom, rather than blindly chasing after the next fact, or relic, or clue.

Oliver finished his pie, left a generous tip, and strode out to his car. The sun was bright overhead. Empty fields stretched away as far as he could see to the west, and the Mississippi river flowed along its meandering course to the east. With the possible exception of some long lost relics of Native American lore, and the shard locked away in the vault of a bank nearby, there was nothing within five hundred miles that could draw him back into the game. He was free to pause, breathe deep of the autumn air, and reflect on what to do next.

He climbed into his car and headed south with no particular destination in mind.