Like father, like daughter.
What her conscience suggested made her roll over and bury her face in the pillow. She was not like Frankie Lang; she wasn’t running away from a marriage or a kid. Sam and Lucan and Burke would be fine without her. They had a stronghold filled with devoted humans and immortal warriors, allies in Orlando and Atlanta, and more money than God. Once they got over the name-calling thing, they’d have each other.
No, she wasn’t like Frankie at all.
Chris had just turned thirteen a few days before her constantly battling parents had had a huge fight over money. The next morning Adele left to go shopping, and Frankie had picked up his board, kissed Chris on the top of her head, and took off.
“See you later, baby,” he called as he walked out to his Jeep.
Chris never saw him again.
Once Frankie had abandoned them, he’d stopped long enough to clean out what was left in the bank account, leaving Adele with nothing. Despite this, Adele refused to get a job, a divorce, or otherwise deal with reality. She repeatedly told her daughter that they would simply wait until Frankie came to his senses and returned home to take care of her and their daughter.
When her checks had begun bouncing and the credit cards stopped working, Adele had been furious. She had spent weeks on the phone demanding more time, more credit, and getting neither. Adele’s Chrysler disappeared in the middle of the night; in the process of filing a police report she learned it had been repossessed. As their food dwindled and the collection notices mounted, she remained in denial, sending Chris off to school each day with the promise that everything would be fine.
The bank began calling about the imminent foreclosure proceedings; Adele refused to speak to the loan officer up until the morning two sheriff’s deputies arrived to evict them from the property.
Some neighbors had first stared through their windows at them, and then closed their blinds so they wouldn’t have to watch.
One of the deputies had been kind enough to offer them a ride to a local shelter for homeless families, where Adele sat in a dead silence as Chris filled out the intake forms. The shelter manager told them they could stay for a week to give Adele time to find a job or someone who could take them in. Adele had said nothing, and moved like a sleepwalker until the manager took them to the dining room to have a meal.
The sight of the tray Chris had fixed for her seemed to rouse Adele from her stupor. “What is this?”
“I don’t know.” Chris, who’d been living on canned food for weeks, sat down beside her and started eating. “It’s not bad. Some kind of stew, I think.”
“This is garbage.” Adele had slapped the fork out of her hand. “We don’t eat garbage.” When the shelter manager came over to speak to her, Adele threw the tray of food at her before dragging Chris up by her arm. “We are going home, Christi. Right now.”
Her arm throbbed as her mother’s thin fingers dug into her skin.
“Mom, please, calm down.” Chris saw flashing red and blue lights coming down the road, knew instinctively the police were coming for them, and tried to dig in her heels. “Let’s go back inside. You don’t have to eat anything. We could just rest for a while.”
“We don’t belong here,” Adele said, her voice as hard as her grip. “We’re going home.”
The cops reached the end of the driveway before they did, and blocked it with their squad car.
“Ma’am?” One of the cops got out and directed his flashlight at Adele’s face. “We got a call from the shelter that there was some trouble inside. You and your girl okay?”
Adele looked down her nose at him. “Those people tried to feed my daughter garbage. You should go and arrest them at once.”
“Calm down, ma’am.” The cop gave Chris an assessing look. “Everything’s going to be fine now, honey. Don’t be scared.”
Her mother yanked on Chris’s arm and hauled her around the cop car. When the officer followed and called for her to stop, Adele broke into a run, dragging Chris alongside her. She tried to keep up, but something caught her foot and sent her sprawling.
“Easy, sweetheart.” One of the cops helped her up.
“Please don’t hurt my mom,” she begged him as Adele began screaming and pummeling the other officer. “She’s just really upset.”
“It’s okay,” the cop told Chris as his partner handcuffed her mother and hustled her into the back of the squad car. “Your mom needs some help, so we’re going to take her to a hospital.”
She saw the shelter manager hovering a few feet away with a plump, white-haired lady in a blue wool coat. “Can I go, too?”
“No, but there’s a safe place downtown where you can stay until she’s better,” he assured her. He beckoned to the woman in the wool coat. “This is a friend of mine named Miss Audrey. She’s going to give you a ride there.”Miss Audrey came over and bent down, putting her face too close. “What’s your name, young lady?” When she didn’t reply, her smile became a tight line. “Answer me.”
“Christi.”
Miss Audrey straightened. “Very good.” She marched Chris over to another police car, but when she shoved her into the back of it, the seat vanished and four marble walls shot up around her, closing her into an airless tomb.
Chris scrambled to her feet and beat her fists against the cold stone. “This isn’t real. This didn’t happen to me. Let me out of here.”
Her shadow doubled, and Chris spun around to see the towering figure of a man in a monk’s robe. For a moment she thought it was Lucan, until he extended the torch he held, and she saw the network of scars covering his fingers and hand.
“Who are you?”
I was the maker of the scroll, and the keeper of the cross. It was I who washed it in my blood. You and your mortal family were my army, my guardians, each sworn to protect the secrets of eternity. Now you number but two. You will not fail me as your sister did.
The smell of burning metal was making her stomach clench. “This is just a dream, and I don’t have any sisters, you asshole.”
You have the loyalty to protect the mortal world from eternal damnation. But do you have the conviction to do what needs be done?
He talked like one of the Kyn, Chris thought, but he was dressed like a Brethren. “Are you Hollander? The guy who stole the emeralds?”
The monk began to laugh, a deep and frightening sound that bounced around the inside of the tomb, each echo growing louder until Chris pressed her hands over her ears and called out for the only hope she had left.
“Jamys.”
* * *
The sky had softened from black to deepest blue by the time Jamys guided the sailboat into Biscayne Bay. Other vessels of various sizes sat anchored in a vast web of light and shadow cast by the brightly lit condominiums and hotels crowding the shoreline. One mortal who had risen early glanced up from the bobber on his fishing line and raised a hand in silent greeting as Jamys passed.
He returned the wave and then studied the assortment of piers, boathouses, and landings jutting out from the bay’s edge. Chris had said they might make use of one of the public docks, but he would need to consult a more detailed map to locate them. He turned the boat back into the wind, dropped the headsail, and backwinded the mainsail. As the boat slowed to a near stop, he secured the rigging and dropped anchor.
Chris still slept below, and it took all his resolve not to go down to join her. After sharing a kiss with her, however, all he could think about was stealing another, and another. He suspected he could kiss her for days and never grow weary of it.
His present dilemma was that he wanted more than kisses from her. Much more.
Jamys checked the horizon again, where the coming dawn had pinked the edges of the clouds. They would have to secure a vehicle to use whenever they were on land, he decided, or perhaps hire—
Jamys.
Chris’s voice called to him with such power and terror that for an instant he stood frozen. Only when he had pulled the door belowdecks from its hinges and jumped down into the cabin did he feel the echo of it through his thoughts. She had not called to him, as he could plainly see her in the cabin’s only bunk, her body still. The only sound he heard came from the soft rhythm of her breathing.
Why had he imagined her shouting his name when she was sleeping so peacefully? It had not been a memory or some fancy of his imagination; he’d heard her as clearly as if she had screamed his name in his ear.
Jamys went to the bunk, where her scent bathed the air and told him that she had been asleep for hours. He saw that she had been so tired, in fact, she had simply dropped on top of the covers. He reached for a blanket that had been left folded atop a chest, shaking it out before bending down to drape it over her. He hated the thought of waking her, and decided against it as he reached to brush a lock of hair from her cheek. He could give her—
Jamys please Jamys help me Jamys find me—
Jamys fell to his knees, blinded and deaf to everything but the bellowing storm that came roaring into his mind. It was as if he had been swept into the heart of a tornado, and as he fought to hold on to consciousness, he heard inside the terrible winds her voice and his name, distant and ragged, as if Christian were calling to him as she fought for her life.
Christian.
I’m here. Jamys, hurry.
Now Jamys felt the psychic barrier between them, as tall and wide as the wall of a fortress. Another Kyn had entered their dream and was using ability to prevent Jamys from reaching Chris’s mind. Without hesitation he threw himself at the other immortal’s barrier, battering it with his thoughts. At first it held fast against him, but as he continued to pour his power against it, he felt it flex and then grow thin. Just as he gathered himself for one last barrage, in his mind appeared a panel of smooth stone that changed from solid white to an opaque gray, and showed on its other side Christian, who stood beating her fists against it.
Such determination for such an untried warrior, another voice said, and the strangeness of it crawled through Jamys’s mind like a swarm of hungry, burrowing insects. In the face of eternity, will you be as steadfast and valiant? Would you kill her to save a hundred, a thousand, a million?