The Adventures Of Ivory Arrow & Jackson Bale

Chapter VI

It was a lazy day for us. We solved each of the cases on our board, so now we're bored... heh, get what I did there? Ivory sat with her back to me, she seemed uneasy. "Are you okay? You haven't said a thing to me since breakfast, and even then you only thanked me for the pancakes." I moved around her to look at her face. It was contorted and frozen in thought.
"We're going to have a visitor soon." She said in a creepy dazed voice. One that fortune tellers would use the make people buy that they're 'special.'
"A visitor? When? It's only noon now, so I'll assume later." I sat back a bit. Relaxed and relieved that she wasn't mad at me.
"The visitor?" She turned to look at me, I could clearly see what she was feeling then. She was scared. "My father." I gulped. Her father? I have never had the opportunity to hear about any of her family. But having her father come by is frightening, what ifs were running through my head. But we're interrupted by a knock at the door. "Maybe we won't answer it. Say we are not here." She shook, gripping the leather chair. What kind of person could make her so frightened, the great Ivory Arrow. I stood up and slowly walked over to the door. Inhaling tremendously, I turned the knob. A tiny old man stood on our welcome mat, his head was bald but hair spiked around his ears and the back of his head. His grin was wild and from ear to ear.
"Hello." I looked down at him. "I'm Mikki J Arrow, I believe my daughter is staying here right? May I come in?" I opened the door further for him to enter. Ivory was still, sitting on the chair curled into a ball. "Little Arrow. How good it is to see you again." He couldn't see her from behind the back of the small chair, but he continued anyway. "I know you must be thinking the worst of me. But I have changed, you know that. I know that. You should come home now, it's been too long, and you are not ready for the real world." The little man turned to face me, sort of. His head was dropped so I couldn't see his eyes. "Excuse me sir, would you tell me who you are and what relationship you have with my daughter?" He was moving to our kitchen slowly, and he jumped up to sit on the island.
"My name is Jackson. I have a partnership with your daughter, we have made well for ourselves, Sir. We solve people's problems by finding things for them. We have solved over fifty of these different problems though, Sir." I think he was impressed, but didn't show it. He just sat there, eating an apple hat we recently brought back from Peru.
"Little Arrow. Let's go get you packed, you need to take a swimsuit, because where we live now, is a beautiful island paradise." Mr. Arrow hopped off the island, and went up our stairs to the bedrooms. He searched for a bit before finding her room. He started to pack for her, before Ivory got up and walked over to him angrily.
"Father, you can't take me away from here. I am too old for this, and too old to live under your roof. Jackson and I have everything under control, and we live rich. Free of rule and law and logic. This IS my paradise." He stared at her for a long time, before actually even breathing. He came up to her and had her kneel to his level. He smiled at her.
"Alright, if you won't come home for goo, or for my sake. Will you come to visit your mother? She won't be around for much longer. Contracted a virus from a beetle, her already frail body couldn't fight, whatever it was, off." Ivory flipped her hair over she shoulder and looked up at me. I have never seen her weak like this before. She stood up, and hugged me, I went stiff, surprised at her action.
"Will you come with me?" She asked. I nodded slowly, after swallowing hard. She let go of me and knelt down to Mr. Arrow again. "We leave in an hour?" The little man nodded.
"I wouldn't advise boyo here to come, I think we should only have family around her now." The man said sadly. I didn't feel bad, I understood his reasons. But Ivory shot up and shouted.
"That is exactly why he will come." I was startled. She said that so confidently. I was a part of her family? She considered that? I felt on cloud nine when we were flying to her home, which was an entire private island.
"Why were you so scared of your father visiting us?" I asked her. I thought I'd figure it out in time, but I couldn't.
"Because Partner, the only reasons he ever comes to see me, is to borrow money or to deliver some bad news." Him coming today was a prime example.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Time ~ Skip~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Two little kids ran out of the only building on the isle. "Ivy, Ivy!" They called excitedly, "welcome home!"
Ivory leaned over to whisper, "that's Joseph and Adah, my little sister and brother. They probably have no idea about my mother because they were the most carefree children I have ever known." She laughed it off. An old lady was walking with her cane and looking up at the birds in the sky. "That's my grandma Susan. She was the one who encouraged me to go on my own path, away from my family." And a male preteen walked passed us to a small treehouse at the right of the cobblestone walkway, he was muscular and pretty good looking, for a dude. "That's Ash, my cousin. My Aunt and Uncle are also in my profession, they left him here when he was a baby." Ivory stopped explaining when the two children ran over and latched onto her legs. She walked with one on each leg into the straw roofed wooden hut.
"Hey baby," a smiling, beautiful lady sat up in her bed by the window. Sun shone through in golden rays, bouncing off her golden hair like the sun shining off the sea. "I didn't want your father leaving to go get you. That wasn't right, I'm so sorry." She looked at her hands resting in the nest of off-white bedsheets. But when she looked at me, her pine green eyes seemed to sparkle. "Oh, and you must be Jackson?" I walked over and sat beside her bed, and Ivory followed later.
"Yes mom. This is my partner in crime, Jackson Bale." Ivory replied quietly and with a smile. Her mother slowly, weakly took my hand.
"Hello, my name is Lorali. I am glad that my daughter has such a handsome partner to solve crime with." She pinched my cheek gently. For a while, I questioned why she knew about our occupation, and yet her father wasn't aware of my own existence. "Ivory has told me a lot about you in her letters." I thought I was going to cry. Ivory... talked about me? She sat up a bit more and leaned over, she wrapped her arms around me loosely with a lot of effort for her. I leaned into her, in an awkward position though.
"Mom. What's going to happen?" Ivory asked, her voice choked a bit. Her mother shook her head slowly. Her smile never leaving her face.
"I want you to be okay. Will you do that for me?" Mrs. Arrow looked at Ivory who remained quiet. Then she looked to me, asking the same thing, asking if I'd protect her daughter. As if she needed to ask. I nodded.
After an hour or so of conversation with Ivory's mother, we left her room and talked with her father on the front porch. "Now you see. She will not be okay. I can't raise those kids alone." He motioned to the children kicking a soccer ball around to each other. "You need to come home, help me out a little." The man slumped over when Ivory shook her head disapprovingly.
"I can't come home father." She sighed, but after a moment, her head shot up. I nearly jumped out of my chair. "Jackson!" She looked at me with adventure in her eyes. A look i know all to well. "Remember that job we refused to take, earlier this week." She asked me, I nodded, semi recalling the sheet of ancient writings. But it wasn't hard to remember it, we hardly ever refused a good case with a lot of character.
"Yes, the one about a bogus amulet with possible, unimaginable healing abilities. I thought we ruled that out as fake." I knew where she was going, but I didn't understand her sudden change of opinion about the case. Is this the part where she becomes irrational due to grief?
"Yes, we ruled it out. But remember then, after tossing the job, we met a doctor who was going on an adventure. To find that same amulet?" She recognized my puzzlement. "Do recall what he looked like?" I slowly nodded. Then she pointed to a bamboo framed picture of Ivory's father and that same doctor.. it was sitting on an end table right inside an open window.
"Sir!" I said, way louder than intended. It scared Mr. Arrow too. "Who is that man!" I grabbed the frame and pointed to the old, bald, extremely tall individual, sipping a large beer alongside Mr. Arrow.
"Him?" He squinted at his face. "Ah yes, Chester Pots. How could I forget that crazy old loon?" He laughed, looking up at the ceiling in thought. "He was a good friend of mine, back in my medical days. He was always talking about a pendant of some kind. He said it would retire us all, and create a revolutionary era. He was nuts, but I felt bad for him when he disappeared. Haven't seen him since. And that was over twenty years ago." As much as I loved hearing about old folk's stories about their younger years. Ivory grabbed the sleeve of my jacket and we ran off the porch. Behind her, she yelled to her father.
"Relax Daddy. We'll come home, and mom will be better again!" She yelled that enthusiastically. Her father ran out onto the porch, watching us get into our beloved jeep and driving off to, who knows where.
"The bijou?" I asked her. We drove for a very long and uncomfortable amount of time. I have no clue where we were in the first place, but now we appeared in the Bijou of New Orleans. "When did you have time to memorize where this artifact was?" I looked at her. She wore a determined face, with a smirk of some kind. I was painfully aware of the many leaches I'll have by the end of this, stuck to me. Sure enough, she made us jump right in and when we emerged on the other side of the small green pool, six little buggers were attached to my arms. I pulled them off with a jerk of my arm, and flung them back into the water. Using all of my will power not to just squish them into the dirt. Anyway, the Bijou was dark even if we came in at high noon. Strange animals called through the trees and muck hanging off their branches.
"Careful Leach Magnet. We need to be quite, as to not attract the unfriendly, sharp toothed neighbors here." She put her hand to her mouth and zipped it shut. A couple of suspicious frogs hoped pasted our way while we walked.
"What are we searching for? There's nothing but swamp here!" I was getting irritated. She knew it. And it was getting darker by the second.
"I know someone who lives around here somewhere. They will help us find this thing. And I'll be able to save my mother." She was too determined to see anything but the path ahead. So she didn't realize the large crocodile slowly peeking out of the murky swamp water. He nearly chomped off her head of I didn't run after it. Not thinking of course, I crashed into the reptile, not Ivory. My good arm got stuck in his jaws, and he dragged me for what felt like miles, before Ivory caught up and stabbed the evil monster in the eye. It let me go, and ran into the water.
"That's strange. Normally those things would rather twist. Not grab and go." I clutched onto my excessively bleeding limb in pain, it was weird, I haven't even broken a bone before, yet alone have I ever bled.
"Oh My God Jackson," she got to my side, ripping her bag open in search for bandages, she found them and tore off my shredded sleeve. To my disagreement. "Shut up. That thing could've killed you. Ignore your shirt for a while, huh?" A loud motor started to buzz through the air, I watched as some moss and branches fell from the treetops. A man came through the water, blazing. He carried a chain saw. His entire body was on fire, he was screaming until he saw us, he just casually walked over to us and smiled.
"Miss. Ivory Arrow." He said it in a fine, Australian accent, sounding also formal. "To what do I owe this humble visit." He bowed. I couldn't get past the flames that were making him radiate heat, the air was already hot enough.
"Cut the crap Jones. We need help with something and you're just the man we needed to see." She tensed in his presence. Obviously she doesn't like him, I'll take her expressions for it and dislike him as well. "But first, one of your lovely pets seemed to have tried to eat my friend as a midmorning snack, care to assist?" He grinned showing his yellow teeth filled with holes.
"I'd love to sweetheart, you know I would. But I've been lookin' for Benji since yesterday. It seems you found him first, where'd he go?" He named the creature Benji. My arm was torn to shreds by a Benji?!
"Shut up Jones. Us first, Crocodile later." Jones fell backwards into the water, when he came up he wasn't flaming. His jean baseball cap was burnt, so we're the edges of his aviators jacket. His face was wrinkled while he never stopped smiling, which was a bit creepy. He took my good arm and wrapped it around his neck, helping me to a small boat, placed at an even smaller dock in the middle of nowhere. "Now, we're here about the Amulet of Zion. I heard a slimy gambler got his grubby hands on a nice artifact not too long ago. Ring any bells, Jones?" The man gulped as he stabbed me with his needle, stitching the giant gash in my shoulder closed.
"Yes'm. I came into it aftr' meeting a shady feller'. Won a brown doo hicky from 'em. But it didn't do notin'. So I tossed it, in the oasis." He grabbed a gauze and started to wrap it on my wound. He smiled at his work once it was finished. I turned around in my stool painfully.
"So, where's this Oasis?" I looked at his face. He was skeptical, talking to me. "Is it here? Or away from the Bijou?" I asked without another answer.
"Answer him Jones, he's here as my partner. You need to answer his questions too. Also, stop looking so smug. We caught you, you are just doing me a favor for old times sake." I glared at him, and wondered what she meant by that.
"Yeah, Yeah Little Lady. The Oasis, Sir," he looked at me uninterested, "is what I call it. It is just the deepest part of this swamp. And not'in goes there, not evn' the crocs. I dropped it in der just like the rest of my useless junk. So now it lies at the bottom. You want it? Go'n get it." He turned to Ivory, his features softened. I was racking my brain trying to figure out their relationship.
"Who is he?" I asked Ivory quietly when Jones was busy with finding a map for us. She looked at me, then looked in the direction of Jones.
"Well, his name is Jayden Jones, he has been a friend of mine since I was a child. His father worked for mine, we used to play together. But he got married to a lady who was a total jerk to me. So we stopped being friends. His wife eventually took his children and left, dying somewhere along the way. His youngest son is Dak- I mean Nickolas. But you can't let him know that. Anyway, yes he has always thought I acted better than him. Only because I felt sympathy for his terrible and unfortunate life." She fought a smile, making it look like a crooked grin. I think our cases, for some reason, have started to coincide with one another.
"Oh..." I was somewhat relieved.
Jones came back to us with his arms full of scrolls. Maps probably. He set them all down on a small wooded table, most of them rolled off in heaps of paper. "K," he rolled the oldest looking one out in front of us, stabbing the right corner with a dagger to keep it in place, "this is map is the 'tire area. The blotchy thins' here and here, are large crocdiles homes. And, this star here, is the... 'amulet' thingy." He air quoted the amulet. The area we needed to get to, was an entire home to those carnivorous reptiles. Ivory smiled.
"It has been too long." She looked at me. Even with my intense anxiety about this, I couldn't help but get excited with her. We instantly left the room and followed the map. We didn't even say goodbye to Jones. It was a well, a small stone well nearly completely covered in moss and vines. But sadly, this small well was guarded by many upon many of crocodiles. Before we could come up with a plan, a flaming ball of Jones ran through. His screams echoed as he ran further and further away from us. It took the creatures a few seconds to realize what happened, then went after him. Giving us the opportunity to hop into the well. I did a fantastic triple twist, while sticking the landing perfectly as always. Ivory followed, with a graceful slid down the sand build up along one side. She lit a torch that she kept in her satchel. A large tinned ran through down into the great unknown.
"What are doing? Who knows what could be down there? I don't even recall why I jumped." I lost my head for a second, regaining it when Ivory socked me to the ground.
"You jumped for the kind lady that showed nothing but happiness to meet you. And you jumped for your partner who would be crushed to pieces if she knew there was a way and we didn't go after it." I nodded, dusting off my butt of all the sand particles that stuck to me.
We walked down the tunnel carefully. Watching our flanks, and watching our fronts. It was dangerous, we both knew that, leaping into trouble like this. So she made a point that if I wanted to, I could go back and wait for her at the entrance of the well.
"Hell no!" I protested. "Do you not recall those twelve foot scaly, dirty, toothy demons that are waiting for us up there. I am going nowhere!" I heard myself, a few years into the black whole. And then I remembered something. "Hey, didn't Jones claim this was part of The Bijou. Not a well? And where are those things he mentioned that were useless so he just tossed away. Shouldn't we have seen something by now?" Ivory looked at me sternly, mulling over my words of utter logic.
"Eww." She scrunched her nose in disgust. "Do you smell that?" I turned around to the direction we came from. Hearing something I wish I wasn't.
"No but I hear it." We started to pick up pace before going into an all our sprint. Behind us was a strong, life ending wave of sewer water, coming from the city. "Crap." I was it closing in faster than we were running. Ivory was searching for a way out and found one.
"Look!" She pointed to a hole in the wall a few feet above the sandy floor. I gave her a boost up and hoped in myself. The wave passed, it carried a glowing blue orb that passed right by our hole. "Shoot! There goes the amulet!" She jumped out of the hole and into the wave. I didn't think of anything when I cannon balled into it. The water was disgusting, but inside the wave was peaceful. Ivory swam up to me holding the blue orb in her hands, it was bigger than I expected. And we jumped out of the water ride, in another hole a mile down from the first one.
"Well..." I was dripping in sewer water. Ivory didn't care, she was admiring the pretty blue jewel that now rested in her satchel bag. "Let's get out of here." We peaked out around the side of the stone circle when we heard footsteps. Jones was glowing, walking over to us.
"I see you found it. Good fer ya. Now you'd best get a move on. Those crocs ll' be down here any moment." We did as we're instructed. Hopping out of a newly mad sinkhole, right across the river, was Ivory's island.
"How convenient." I smiled. She looked like an excited little kid, about to receive a toy for good behavior. Her father was waiting for us, rocking back and forth on his porch. He got up quickly when he spotted us and ran to greet us. Stepping back after getting a whiff of our cloths. He just reluctantly patted our shoulders.
"Oh my," Ivory's mother smiled at the jewel that we returned with. "What is this?" She asked. I kneeled next to Ivory who sat in the chair beside the bed. She took the orb and used her pocket knife to chip off a piece of it.
I watched her go to the kitchen and ground up the stone into a glass of iced tea. "Here Ma. You'll be all better now, okay?" Miss. Lorali took the cup in her small hands and sipped it. Ivory grabbed the bottom to tip it all the way. "All of it Ma, if you want to get better.." You could visibly see her healing. Her hair was regaining its full golden glow, her skin became more of a natural shade of tan, and her arms started to grow a bit of muscle to look healthy.
She slowly stood up with my help. Her laugh was beautiful, she was so happy and smiling from ear to ear. "Our job here is done. I love you all, please write soon." Ivory said, leaving the hut with me in tow. I looked at her, my eyes pleaded. Was that all she wanted to say to them? "No, but I know if we don't leave now. I wouldn't be able to leave as easily."