"Heirs of the Shadow"
by Azar

Part II - The Forgotten Chapter

"Camoogevat?" Lois asked as the doorbell chimed, her mouth full of Frosted Mini Wheats and her nose deep in a story about the ongoing violence on the West Bank.

Chloe glanced at her own cereal, debating whether or not answering the door would give it just enough time to get mildly soggy, the way she liked it, or let the little frosted biscuits turn completely to mush. She cast a sideways glance at her cousin.

And Clark thinks *I'm* a news hound.

Despite the lack of any answer, the brunette had continued eating calmly, her eyes darting back and forth along the lines of the article.

Sighing, the blonde stood, taking her bowl with her. "Yeah, I guess."

The bell rang again when she was about halfway through the front room. "Geez, impatient, aren't we, Mr.--" She stopped herself before the word 'Luthor' could escape, shaking her head with a frown. Obviously the humiliating catastrophe that was last night was still on her mind, inspiring all sorts of weird semi-Freudian slips.

Whoever was at the door was probably a salesman peddling face cream or something. If they actually came to your door anymore--between Internet SPAM and telemarketers, Chloe wasn't entirely sure the door-to-door sales business was still booming. It might make for an interesting exposé once she got back home: the demise of an American industry...

With that thought in mind, the blonde stuck her spoon in her mouth. Standing on tiptoe, she peered through the peephole...and almost dropped her bowl at the sight of Lex Luthor standing on the front stoop.

Okay, now this was just getting way too damned weird, and she wasn't even in Smallville!

One shaking hand fumbled with the locks on the door while the other tried to keep from spilling milk and Mini Wheats all over the welcome mat. The door swung open.

"Mex!" Flushing, she remembered the spoon in her mouth and hastily removed it. Great. She'd just greeted Lex Luthor in her pyjamas, with a spoon hanging out of her mouth like one of Gram's cigarettes. "I mean, Lex! What a surprise!"

"A surprise?" the man on the other side of the door echoed with a skeptical smile and a raised eyebrow.

Chloe almost swallowed her tongue. He knew she'd anticipated him??

"I would think, after last night, you would've been expecting me to drop by," he continued smoothly, allowing her to breathe again.

"Honestly, I thought you'd never want to see anyone in my family again, after last night," she admitted, shamefaced.

Lex smiled. "Well, if your great-grandmother's right, your family is my family." He refrained from mentioning that there were a few people in his own family that he wouldn’t mind never seeing again.

"Uh, yeah...about that." The blonde squirmed a little in the doorway. "Gram's almost a hundred years old. I guess she just got a little confused."

"Nevertheless...would you mind if I spoke with her for a moment?"

The young reporter hesitated, but finally stepped out of the opening, letting him enter the house. Closing the door behind them, she led him down the hall into the kitchen, where Margo and Lois now had their heads bent together over the New York Times crossword.

They both looked up as expensive shoes proclaimed their arrival on the tile floor, the older woman smiling and the younger actually distracted from the paper. "Well, Lex, it's about time you got here."

"You've been expecting me?" he asked.

Margo nodded. "I've been waiting for you. As a matter of fact, the entire purpose of my little escapade last night was to bring you here." Her eyes twinkled with mischief and Lex found himself suddenly doubtful that there was any senility clouding that mind, no matter how old the body housing it might be.

He spread his hands, inviting her to continue. "I'm here."

"Gram, are you *sure* you're okay?" Chloe questioned worriedly.

The silver haired woman pinned her great-granddaughter with a rueful, knowing look, her next words as astute as if she too made a habit of reading minds. "I haven't forgotten my age, dear. I brought you all here because of just how aware of it I am. This may be my last chance to tell this story."

Both girls and Lex all started to speak, but Margo interrupted them with a firm hand on Lois's shoulder. "Why don't you girls run and get dressed while I show Mr. Luthor around the house?"

*****

"I still can't believe you never told me you know Lex Luthor," Lois grumped, digging aimlessly through her suitcase and making a mess of the guest room in the process.

"That's because you never asked. You just assumed that no one of consequence could possibly live in Smallville," Chloe pointed out, pulling her pyjama top over her head.

The two girls had been friends--and friendly rivals--practically since they were born, but there were still times when the brunette's casual arrogance got on her cousin's nerves. Lois stubbornly refused to acknowledge anything that didn't fit into her idea of how the world should be, and it frequently blinded her to the most obvious things. Smallville was definitely one of those blind spots--she'd once insinuated that Chloe's Wall of Weird was "reaching" for a good, newsworthy story. Meaning she didn't believe a word of it, in typical Scully-like fashion.

The blonde grinned. On the positive side, though, once Lois *was* disproved, she did have the ability to laugh at her own obliviousness.

"Okay, you've got me there," the brunette admitted. "Still...I've never known you to pass up a chance to prove me wrong." She ducked as a pair of socks came flying from the general direction of Chloe's suitcase. "Thanks, but I think I'll go with something a little more dressy. What did you wear the first time you met Lex Luthor?"

"A hospital gown." Okay, so that wasn't technically true, but it communicated the point. "And besides, technically this isn't the first time you've met him. Last night we were all in *formal* wear...what better first impression do you want?"

Lois shot her a daggered look but hung the suit back in the closet, selecting instead a stylish pair of jeans and a powder-blue baby tee with "diva" written on it in a loopy, glitter-dusted script.

"Maybe I'll have to come visit you after all--what other good looking guys do you have up your sleeve?" She flicked a strand of long, straight brown hair over her shoulder, causing her cousin to flinch with that same irrational fear. Just because her cousin bore a noticeable resemblance to Lana Lang--even down to the initials--didn't mean that introducing her to Clark would make him instantly profess his undying love to her, Chloe scolded herself.

Whatever her subconscious might have thought of that argument, her mouth wasn't convinced, because the next thing to come out of it was, "Well, the rest are all hicks, so none that would interest you."

******

There was something timeless about Margo Lane's home, Lex noticed as the old woman leisurely led him from room to room. Many of the furnishings had probably been here as long as she had, if not longer. He ran a finger along the smooth cherry wood of the couch, marveling at its age and condition, then let his attention drift to the simple but elegant marble mantelpiece...almost freezing as his eyes came to rest on a silver-framed picture set in a place of honor upon it.

"My God."

The face was familiar, so familiar that he could've almost sworn it was buried with a hundred other family portraits somewhere in the ancestral manor he'd once called home. Except he knew he'd never seen that young man before.

He felt Margo's eyes on him and looked up to see her smile sadly. "That's my son, Reinhardt Lamont Lane. Named for the two most important men in our lives."

Lex moved towards the photo almost involuntarily, until he was close enough to really examine the face.

"It's a mouthful, I know," the old woman admitted. "So we always called him Arlie."

Arlie had Lamont Cranston's nose and his piercing stare, as well as something about the mouth. But even in the black and white, Lex could also see Ms. Lane's dark eyes and more fine-boned face. The only way he couldn't have been the progeny of both was if either she or Lamont had an unknown twin.

"Lamont died before I learned I was pregnant. I tried to fight for my son, to at least give him his father's name...but your grandmother had been declared his legal heir when he disappeared after the Great War. An arrangement Lamont formalized in his will when he returned--he never married Lena's mother, but he took good care of their child. As he would have for ours, had he lived to know him."

"I'm sorry," Cranston's youngest surviving legal heir apologized softly. "I wish there was something I could do, but my father would never agree--"

Chloe's great-grandmother shook her head. "I'm not looking for an inheritance for my girls, Mr. Luthor. At least not a monetary one. They'll make their own way in the world--they don't need it made for them. I just want them to know who they are."

Taking down the photograph and handing it to him, she smiled again. "I want all of Lamont's heirs to know who they are."

"You mean it's true?" Chloe's surprised voice broke in from the doorway. Apparently the girls had arrived in time for the revelation, making Lex almost wonder if Margo had somehow timed it.

He nodded. "If you've ever seen photographs of Lamont Cranston, you'll notice the resemblance is...unmistakable."

Lois frowned, reaching out a hand for the picture, which he gave her. She stared at it for a moment before letting out a little gasp. "Omigod! I can't believe I never noticed that before!!!"

Apparently she was the only one who couldn't believe it; Gram and Chloe both could, though neither of them voiced it. Lex frowned. Then how had he known?

He saw that same knowing look in Margo's eyes, and the young Luthor found himself unnerved all over again.

"What exactly did you mean, you want all of us to know who we are?" he asked, attempting to change the subject.

The old woman's smile turned mysterious. "That the story doesn't end with Lamont Cranston."

The three young people looked at each other. "Then what does it end with?" Chloe asked.

"That, my dears, is entirely up to you. My job is just to relate the chapters that no one else knows. Come." Margo seated herself on the sofa with an enigmatic smile, patting the cushions on either side of her. "Sit down. This is a story I've been waiting to tell for a very long time and I refuse to do so standing when there's a delightfully comfortable couch right here."

One more puzzled glance was passed between the three young people, then Chloe and Lois took their places on either side of their great-grandmother and Lex perched himself on the edge of an overstuffed chair that faced the sofa catty-corner.

"Lois, sweetie, you've studied the Depression. You know how fortunate those of us were who didn't have to struggle, like most of the country."

The brunette nodded, but said nothing. Margo continued.

"Fortunately for him, Lamont had always mistrusted the stock market, so the Cranston fortune was one of the few not to be swallowed up in the crash. He'd invested wisely--in property and banks that didn't indulge in speculation and the like. And the opium money he never did invest, not wishing himself or anyone else to profit from it."

Here, Lex interrupted. "Wait a moment--opium money?"

The old woman nodded grimly. "Not many people knew that secret. I was the only one to discover it after he returned to New York, and he didn't tell me. As you probably know, Lex, Lamont disappeared for about seven years after World War I. Then reappeared in New York as if he had never been gone, and no one ever knew where he had been or what he'd done there."

The young Luthor nodded slowly. "True. However considering he'd been stationed in China and came back fluent in Mandarin with a passion for Asian art..."

"It was assumed he'd spent time in the Far East. And correctly. Those seven years he spent as master of some of the most profitable opium fields in all of Tibet."

"Lamont Cranston was an opium lord?" Lois blurted out in disbelief.

"You may have heard of Ying Ko, the butcher of Lhasa?"

"That--" This time it was Lex's turn to have trouble with the idea. "--was my great-grandfather?" Dear God, no wonder his father was such a bastard--it was apparently genetic.

Pushing aside the grim concern of what that meant for him, he focused again on Margo, who was nodding.

"How is that possible?" the brunette asked. "Lamont Cranston had a reputation as something of a playboy, but he was also a great philanthropist, generally considered one of New York's most respected--if mysterious--citizens."

The old woman's smile was somber, but not with nostalgia. "When he left New York to enlist, against his parents' wishes, that's probably exactly what he was. A charming young man who was something of a womanizer but otherwise harmless. But Lamont learned something terrible about himself on the killing fields of that war. He discovered that he liked it."

Lamont's great-grandson shivered almost imperceptibly--how many times, already, had he found himself horrified by how easy it would be to give in to that same temptation? Almost imperceptibly because something caused Chloe to shoot him a sharp, startled look from the other side of her great-grandmother.

For once seeming oblivious--although he was sure she wasn't--Margo went on. She explained how Lamont had battled this newfound ruthlessness even as the Great War raged on around him, only to fall to it after Versailles brought the fighting to an end and gave him no further outlet for the murderous glee within him. How, unable to face his homeland as the monster he'd become, he'd found a twisted sort of refuge in the opium fields, and in the merciless rise to power that made Ying Ko one of the most feared names in Asia.

The most frightening thing about the story was that it made sense.

"So what happened?" Chloe demanded. "How did he ever get that part of himself under control enough to come home?"

Gram chuckled. "He was kidnapped. By the sacred guard of the Tulku."

"The Who-ku?"

"The Tulku was a Tibetan Holy Man, a mystic. He saw that the same dark shadow which had transformed Lamont into a monster also drew on an untapped well of enormous power. He kidnapped Ying Ko to train him to use that power for good, even against the will of his heart. It would be the price of his atonement for what he had done, to battle the evil he knew first hand could lurk in the hearts of men."

Lois frowned, a pensive crinkle appearing between her eyebrows. "Why does that sound familiar?"

Margo chuckled, and the young Luthor had a sudden flash of insight that there had been several clues to what came next embedded in the story to this point. But for whatever reason he still couldn't fathom what they added up to.

"How would you, Lois, ask a man to atone for a lifetime's worth of evil, of crime, in seven years?"

"Make him become a crime fighter," Chloe suggested logically.

"But Lamont Cranston wasn't a cop," the brunette objected before Lex had a chance to. "Wainright Barth was. But Cranston never even showed much interest in his uncle's profession, at least according to the books I read."

"No, he wasn't a cop," her great-grandmother agreed. "But the power I was referring to wasn't his wealth, or the charisma that had made men follow him in slaughter, though he used both as tools and the latter is relevant...the power I mean was the power to cloud men's minds. To make them see, hear, and believe that which didn't exist or at least wasn't as it seemed. That is what the Tulku taught him."

"Okay...how would that make him a crime fighter?"

Margo's eyes twinkled, brightening her smile. "A man can't shoot what he can't see, dear. And vengeance seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once...if a disembodied voice told you all the sins you'd ever committed and then demanded you confess to them--backing up the threat with physical blows from no apparent source and sometimes even wresting your own will away from you--wouldn't even the most hardened criminal break?"

Lois frowned. "You mean, like the Shadow?"

The glint in the older woman's eyes turned almost smug, her right hand reaching out to rub the smooth ruby in the silver ring on her left. "Yes. Exactly like the Shadow."