Chapter 19: Chapter 19

Since he’d kissed her in the woods, everything between them had been different, even though they hadn’t stopped to talk about what it would mean for them to be a couple. Would the rest of the team be okay with that? What would happen if things got tense between them? Would they still be able to fulfill their mission?

It just seemed silly to ponder those things right now, considering how she felt when she was with him. It had taken her too long to realize that everything she’d been missing in her life was right in front of her, but part of that was because she’d never thought she deserved someone like Cutter, never even saw him as a possibility. But discovering who she was had also made her realize that she deserved to be happy. She deserved to be loved. Someone like Cutter, someone good, kind, funny, patient, intelligent… someone wonderful, could love her. And perhaps most importantly, she could love herself.

Ru took one last glance in the mirror, and happy with what she saw there, she headed out the door.

Cutter was waiting for her in the hallway. “Hi,” he said, a goofy grin on his face.

“Hi, yourself,” she replied, knowing she probably looked just as sappy as he did.

“So, uh, about… what just happened….”

“Yeah?”

“That was… cool, right? I mean, we’re good, aren’t we?”

Ru couldn’t help but giggle. “Cutter, look at my face. Do I look cool to you?”

“You look… hot,” he replied, and before she knew it, he had her in his arms again.

“I didn’t remodel that hallway so that you could use it for your necking sessions!” Rider shouted up the stairs from the parlor.

“I guess his hearing is as good as yours?” Ru asked, her hand caressing Cutter’s jawline.

“Yeah it is!” Rider shouted up the stairs in response.

Clearing his throat, Cutter said, “I think we better head downstairs.”

“You’re right,” Ru agreed. He turned, and she took his hand muttering, “To be continued.” A quick squeeze of her fingers let her know he agreed.

Lyric was sitting in her usual chair with her laptop open in front of her on the coffee table. She had an amused expression on her face, but she didn’t say anything. Ivy, who had received several stitches at the emergency room for the injuries she’d sustained in her “climbing accident” was beaming as Ru and Cutter walked in.

Rider was standing behind his chair. “You sit there,” he said, gesturing at Ru and pointing at one corner of the sofa, “and you sit there.” He pointed Cutter to the corner farthest away from Ru’s spot. “And don’t make me sit between you. There will be no hanky panky during team meetings, got it?”

“I think someone’s a little jealous,” Cutter mumbled as he took his spot.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cutter,” Rider replied, as he took his seat. “We’re cousins.” He winked at Ru and had her giggling again.

“All righty then,” Lyric said, rolling her eyes. “I have some extremely important information I wanted to share with you.”

“About?” Ru asked, leaning forward in anticipation. She had an inkling of an idea what Lyric was about to say, and the grin on her friend’s face made her think it was very good news, but Ru didn’t want to get her hopes up.

“About… the other two portals.” Lyric clapped her hands together in glee.

“Well, get on with it. Come on now. Do we have locations? And don’t be jabbering anything in some other language I ain’t gonna understand like you did last time,” Rider implored.

Lyric laughed. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you everything without doing that, but the short answer is, yes. I think so!”

“What?” Ru asked, ecstatic. She looked at the faces of the rest of her friends and saw they were just as happily surprised as she was herself.

“Where are they?” Ivy asked.

“How did you figure it out?” Cutter wanted to know.

“Okay—one question at a time. Let me start at the beginning. When we got Maggie’s pictures, I noticed that the runes are actually mirror images of each other. It was just hard to tell under the new scars Raphael put there, and also baby skin is different than adult skin.”

“Sure,” Cutter nodded along on behalf of all of them.

“So… I analyzed the runes compared to the Gaelic ones first, since that was the language Raphael had used. But there was no match, nothing decipherable. I used every example of runes I could to try to see if any language would give me a hint as to what I was looking at. Finally, I decided to think about what Nana Sue had said, so I pulled up the Hebrew Aleph-bet.”

“Aleph-bet?” Rider asked. “Were the ancient Hebrews all really bad spellers.”

“Very funny,” Lyric replied, generating a gentle breeze with her hand that blew his hair backward. “No, that’s what it’s called. Stay with me.”

“I’m trying to,” he said as he straightened his hair.

“No, they were not bad spellers. But as I was looking at their aleph-bet, I noticed I’d been looking at the markings on Ru’s back wrong. I was starting with the left side and reading left to right, but I should’ve been looking from right to left.”

“But my scars go up and down,” Ru reminded her.

“Right. I’d already turned the picture so that it was horizontal. So… what I came up with when I did that was stunning.”

“And that would be…?” Rider asked.

“Patience,” Ivy reminded him.

“It’s three letters,” Lyric continued. “Mem, aleph, and peh.”

“And that means?” Apparently, Cutter was only slightly more patient than his cousin.

“Well, I was stuck again, because mem means water, aleph means ox or bull, and peh means mouth.”

“I think we know who that is referring to.” Rider looked at the others but used his thumb to point at Lyric.

She growled at him and continued. “I spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out what sort of a secret code that would be. Or if there were three locations associated with those different letters. I wrote them down, stared at them, and then decided to do the obvious.”

“Which was to tell us what the location of the two remaining portals are?” Cutter asked, hopeful.

“No, to translate them. Into English! Because, whoever put them there, whether it was God or someone else, knows we speak English.”

“Why didn’t He just write the word in English then?” Ivy asked.

Lyric shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe so that we could have an adventure together.”

“Next time, maybe he could just send us Disney tickets?” Rider muttered.

“So, when you translated it, you got…?” Cutter began.

“I got three letters. M-A-P.”

“Oh, I get it!” Rider said, slamming both of his hands down on his legs. “Pam! We’re supposed to find someone named Pam, and she’ll find the portals!”

“No, jerkface. It’s a map.”

“That does make more sense,” Rider said, nodding thoughtfully.

“But we already knew it was a map.” Ru was confused.

“We thought it was a map, but this let me know for sure it was a map. And then, I discovered something else.”