He locks eyes with her.
“Who are you?” he says, his voice a low rumble that sounds too deep and too adult for his svelte, youthful body.
Lilliane has stopped reading, stopped walking, is looking at them over one shoulder. She’s studying Ryan’s sudden paralysis, and then her gaze drops to Emily’s panties, to the letter resting under the sideband.
“Who are you?” Ryan Benoit growls.
“Your father’s dying,” Emily whispers.
At the mention of his father, he closes his hands around her throat and lifts her up and out of the chair with stunning, supernatural strength. With the few gasps of air she has left, Emily wheezes, “That’s enough!”
Everything that happens next seems to happen in the same terrifying instant.
She hears Jonathan scream her name, her real name, as he vaults off his podium.
Lilliane orders Ryan to put her down only to be stunned by Jonathan’s piercing cry—Emily!—and the revelation that she is not Lily Conran after all.
Jonathan races toward them. She braces for the impact of him, prepares for him to knock them both off the dais and to the floor, a blessing if it gets Ryan’s hands off her throat. But just then, Lilliane raises one outstretched palm, fingers tensed, and suddenly Jonathan flies backward across the tent’s floor, as if he’s been pulled by a string, a string that drags him up into the air. He smacks into the tent’s wall, which appears to consume him like a hungry mouth.
“We’re done!” Lilliane roars, and Emily realizes the words aren’t meant for her or the other guests. They’re meant for the rest of her team.
“Who are you?” Ryan growls, hands tensing around her throat.
Lilliane shakes her head at his display, lifts both arms skyward, and suddenly the walls of the tent sweep in around them as if the top of the tent itself were being drawn skyward by a giant hand.
Darkness swallows her. Four gunshots tear through the air somewhere nearby. She can hear Marcus shouting orders or threats, she can’t tell which. But the tent’s skin feels like it’s suffocating her now. And she’s not alone.
Once again, Ryan’s hands have closed around her throat.
25
It isn’t a death grip. But if he doesn’t intend to choke her to death, he’s intent on incapacitating her, at least. Or maybe he just wants to terrify her. Either way, Emily is too stunned by the sight of the night sky appearing high above Ryan Benoit to give the man the reaction he seems to crave, and the resulting rage deforms his beautiful face even more.
It’s as if the tent itself is flying away through the treetops, snapping tree branches as it goes, showering leaves and snapped limbs to the wood floor all around them. Suddenly, Ryan’s hands leave her throat. He’s yanked from her body by someone she can’t see. As soon as she can manage a full breath, she reaches for the envelope still tucked into the side band of her panties. When her fingertips find its sweaty edge, relief floods her along with fresh oxygen.
Marcus, soaked from head to toe, has aimed his gun directly at Ryan’s face. There’s chaos all around them, but these two men are locked in a sudden standoff over her prone, half-naked body. With his free hand, Marcus tosses her robe onto her. She tries pulling it on, but she can’t take her eyes off of Ryan, whose stony expression doesn’t display a single trace of fear at the sight of a powerful handgun pointed at the bridge of his nose.
“Give me the letter,” Ryan says calmly.
“How ’bout you apologize to the lady first?”
“I’m sorry she’s a liar who deceived us and I hope she’s grateful she’s still breathing. How’s that? Now give me the letter.”
It takes Emily a second to process what happens next. Ryan sweeps one hand up through the air in front of him and suddenly Marcus’s handgun is sailing through the air on a trail of glittering gold. It flies through the spot where the tent wall was only moments before and splashes into the swamp.
Marcus lowers his now empty gun hand slowly, never once taking his eyes off the man before him as he processes the guy’s unfathomable strength.
“Emily,” Marcus says quietly.
“Yes.”
“Run.”
And then, despite being clearly outmatched, Marcus slugs the guy. Ryan absorbs the punch as if it were a light shove on the shoulder. He blinks, gives them both a shit-eating grin, then his eyes land on Emily’s new pose and the swagger leaves him.
Robed and on her feet, Emily grips the center of the letter in both hands. From the precise placement of her tense fingers, there’s no mistaking her intention.
“If you hurt him,” she says, “if you hurt anyone, I’ll tear it to pieces right now and your father will go to the grave without you knowing what’s in this letter.”
“If I wanted to speak to that son of a bitch, I wouldn’t need you to find him.”
“We know, Ryan,” Marcus says. “That’s why we moved him someplace safe, in case this didn’t go well. And newsflash. It’s not going well.”
It’s a bald-faced lie, but Marcus tells it with utter conviction.
Now that she’s standing, Emily can take in more of their dramatically altered surroundings. The four members of the strike team have Ryan surrounded; the guns they’ve aimed at him look more like cannons, and their gear and night camouflage make them look like something out of a movie. In the absence of the tent, they’re now surrounded by a scabbard of broken tree branches and watery, night darkness. She can see two of the other guests, huddling in what used to be a corner of the tent, the departure of which has left behind tattered pieces of fabric that partially cover the walkways. To her astonishment, she sees the boats are all still there, save for the one in which they ferried away the frightened guest. But Lilliane and her team members are gone, vanished. All twenty-three of them.
Twenty-two of them, she corrects herself. One stayed behind.
“This is not a negotiation,” Ryan says. “I could take that letter out of her hands in five seconds.”
“And that’s when we’d empty every piece of firepower in this room into you so we could find out just how strong you really are.”
“I’m pretty fucking strong,” Ryan says with a confident smile.
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t be fun,” Marcus responds.
“You’re not strong enough to keep your shit together at the sight of your father’s handwriting,” Emily says.
When he turns his furious gaze on her, she sees a pulse of gold light pass through his eyes. Marcus sees it too, but if it frightens him, he doesn’t let it show.
“Tear it up!”
Emily doesn’t recognize the voice at first. It’s Dupuy. He’s running toward her and he’s coming fast. Like Marcus, he’s soaked from head to toe. Ryan takes a step toward her. All four strike team members raise their giant guns, and then suddenly the letter’s been ripped from her hands, not by Ryan but by Frank who, to everyone’s astonishment, is tearing it into shreds.
“No!” Ryan shouts, but the ring of firepower around him holds him in place. He’s strong, but not indestructible. Or maybe he’s just unwilling to endure whatever healing process a rain of automatic bullets would require of him. He does nothing, even as Dupuy casts several handfuls of the letter off the side of the platform, where they flutter like snowflakes to the black water.
“What are you doing, Frank?” Marcus cries.
Dupuy whirls on his employer’s long-lost son. He is not just soaked, but exhausted, breathless, possessed of an anger that gives him brash confidence despite Ryan’s evident supernatural abilities.
“Where is he?” Dupuy growls.
“Oh, no,” Emily whispers despite herself. She’s scanning the room now. Two other robed guests, clutching each other in terror. Only two. And neither one of them is Jonathan. “Oh, no. Oh, no…”
“Where is Jonathan Claiborne?” Dupuy shouts.
“I don’t know anyone named Jonathan Claiborne,” Ryan answers.
“Leonard Miller,” Marcus adds.
“Yo
u’re going to take us to him right now and you better pray nobody lays a hand on him before we get there,” Dupuy says.
“Or after,” Marcus adds.
“And why would I do that?” Ryan asks.
“Because he’s the only one of us who read that damn letter, that’s why,” Dupuy says. “So if you want to hear your daddy’s final message, you’re going to have to hear it from the guy your boss just kidnapped.” When he sees Marcus and Emily’s stares, he adds, “He read it tonight before we came here. He said he didn’t want us going in blind in case either of the copies got lost or taken away by somebody besides this asshole. And no, he didn’t tell me what it said.”
“If I wanted to speak to my father, which I don’t, I could find him without you ass clowns.”
“Yeah, well, everyone who works for your dad knows where we are tonight and they know why we’re here,” Marcus says. “They’ve got our coordinates and if we don’t come home safe and sound, with Jonathan, you’ll have problems, Ryan. Lots of very big problems.”
“Great. More bullet sponges crawling all over some plywood platform in the middle of the swamp. Look at the setup. We never use the same location twice. Tell me that’s not all you’ve got, Jarhead.”
“I’ve got a picture of your boss Lilliane Williams that shows she went missing in nineteen fifty-nine,” Marcus answers. “Oh, and also, she hasn’t aged a day since. Magnolia Gate has it too, and they’re waiting on my orders for how to proceed. I’m still thinking it over, to be frank. But if they don’t get some orders from me soon, you can bet your pretty behind that picture’s gonna get splashed all over the news, which is going to seriously screw with your business model, Ass Clown.”
The confidence drains from Ryan in an instant, his sharply defined arms going limp at his sides, his bare, muscular chest heaving with suddenly strained deep breaths.
Dupuy says, “Also, take a look around. I think your coworkers have a different attitude about exposure than you do. Maybe that’s why they left you to deal with the fallout of your little tantrum alone.”
“I chose to stay,” Ryan says. “She gave the order and I chose to stay and deal with it all. Don’t presume to understand how we operate. You know nothing about who we are!”
“Yeah, okay,” Marcus answers. “Well, what you’ll be dealing with after tonight are teams of highly trained mercenaries combing the swamps for you and your friends, not some random private investigator you can scare off with your magic tricks.”
“They’re not tricks,” Ryan growls, but Emily is now the focus of his attention. “What are you, Lily Conran? The sister I never wanted?”
“What are you, Ryan Benoit?” she asks him. “A vampire?”
“Vampires aren’t real,” he says quietly. “I’m real.”
But it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself with these final two words, and in the silence that settles over the platform, his expression becomes plaintive, and for a while no one says anything. The sadness that resonates from him overwhelms her as totally as the expression that passed over Lilliane’s face when her frightened guest departed the proceedings earlier that evening.
“The choice is yours, Ryan,” Marcus says. “We’ve all known your father for years, all of us, and he never mentioned you until a few weeks ago. He’s dying. His defenses are down, and there’s something he wants you to know. So it’s up to you. How do you want to spend the last hours of his life? Finding out what he has to say, or knowing he’s hunting you and your friends like dogs?”
“I don’t need a deathbed apology from that man,” Ryan says quietly.
“Who says it’s an apology?” Emily says. “Maybe it’s something new, something you’ve never heard before. That’s why you want to know what you’re walking into before you go, and that’s why you’re going to take us to Jonathan so he can tell you what was in the letter. Then you can decide if your own father is worth the trouble.”
“Or the pain,” Marcus adds.
“I’ll take you to Lilliane,” he finally answers. “On one condition: you lose the soldiers of fortune here. I want them to escort our guests back to their rendezvous points. And I can assure you”—he raises his voice as he turns to address the two mortified, robed, masked people cowering at the far edge of the platform—“your money will be refunded, provided you didn’t deceive us as well. And perhaps someone should get Miss Conran her clothes.”
“Emily,” she says. “My name’s Emily Blaine.”
“Well, I wish I could say it was nice to meet you.”
“Same here.”
“Try using your real name next time and see if it goes better.”
Marcus beckons to one of the strike team members. Without taking their eyes off Ryan, the two men begin to confer in quiet whispers. For the most part, Marcus is the one whispering, the other guy just nods.
“How did they leave?” Emily asks.
Despite the drama of everything that’s proceeded this question, it sends a shockwave of silence through everyone around her; it feels as if they’ve all steeled themselves against the fact that any answer Ryan gives will force them all to accept the full magnitude of how thoroughly bent their minds are by the events of the evening.
“Did they fly?” Emily asks. “Did they really fly out of here?”
“We don’t fly. We leap. There’s only so far we can go.” There’s a hunger in his eyes, a need to explain himself that catches her off guard.
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head as if he’s shaking off the cloying sound of her voice. “I’m not about to explain our origins to a team of secret agents who blew their way into a ceremony in which no one was going to be harmed.”
Marcus says, “You had your hands around her throat, dude.”
“This is going to be a specific exchange of information and nothing more. Your friend will tell me what was in my father’s letter and…”
“And then you’re going to give him back to us,” Emily says, “which is a lot more than exchanging information.”
“My point is that none of us are going to stand there while you assault us with questions about what we are. We didn’t invite you into our world.”
“This isn’t your world,” Emily says, even as she feels Frank Dupuy lay a warning hand on her shoulder. “The swamp doesn’t belong to you. The night doesn’t belong to you. And you’re more than happy to show off your talents to rich people who are willing to pay for the service, so spare me the sanctimony and stop acting like we shot our way into your peaceful commune. You could have had your letter and had all of us out of your hair in ten minutes if your boss hadn’t taken my best friend. So stop calling this is an exchange of information because it’s not. This is a kidnapping, and what we’ve agreed to give you is a ransom.”
“It’s Lilliane’s ransom you should be more worried about,” Ryan says. “I’ve agreed to take you to Jonathan, but Lilliane’s the one who will have to let him go. And trust me, she has her own mind about these things. Are you done lecturing me, Emily Blaine?”
“I’ll be done when I have Jonathan back.”
“Okay,” Marcus says, breaking his huddle with the strike team’s leader. “Our guys will escort your guests back to their pickup points. But wherever we’re going, you travel with us the whole way. None of this leaping stuff you guys are so crazy about. Is there enough gas in those boats to get us there?”
Ryan nods, but he’s still studying Emily, as if the afterburn of her anger is intoxicating.
“Can someone get this guy a shirt?” Marcus asks.
“I didn’t bring a shirt,” Ryan says. “Stop wasting time.”
“Can someone get this guy a ball gag? And maybe a leash?”
“Now you’re talking,” Ryan answers. He studies Marcus with undisguised lust. But Marcus is too busy directing the other members of the strike team, who have split up into groups of two men each and are now escorting the terrified guests to two separate boats. After a while, Ryan feels Em
ily’s eyes on him and turns to face her.
“I’m a radiant,” he says. “That’s what we’re called.”
“Who calls you that?” But she’s remembering Lilliane’s words before Alexandra Vance’s fantasy exploded out across the space they’re now standing on like stranded shipwreck survivors. Prepare for radiance...
“It’s what we call ourselves,” Ryan answers.
Just then, Dupuy arrives with her folded clothes in both hands. Ryan turns the hard ridges of his naked back to her and walks to the edge of the platform as if he’s about to meditate on the swamp.
26
After thirty minutes on the water in the same boat Emily was picked up in earlier that night, Ryan Benoit points to the dark horizon and says, “That’s it!” But Emily can barely see anything, just deeper, looming shadows, no sign of the restored plantation house Ryan claimed would be waiting for them at the end of their journey.
Ryan reduces the engine to a low, chugging sputter, barely louder than the splashes from the propeller, and then, after another minute or two, Emily can finally make out the outline of large trees forming a dense canopy beneath the star-flecked sky and dim tendrils of orange light she assumes are coming from heavily draped windows. The island isn’t just small and isolated; it looks barely inhabited. There’s no road visible, no dock, no snaking garden paths marked with lights.
Allowing Ryan to drive not only kept his hands full, it also kept him in one place, both of which seemed to make Dupuy and Marcus feel more confident about the trip in general, even though Ryan is probably capable of doing things to them with his bare hands that would render ordinary weapons insignificant. For the entire ride, Marcus has stood at the back of the open deck just behind the wheel, newly armed with a Beretta M9 he got from one of his strike team members—it was easier than fishing his SIG out of the swamp—his intent stare never leaving Ryan’s back. Now he stands up straight, still watching their shirtless, hard-bodied pilot instead of their destination.
Just at the moment when Emily is sure Ryan’s about to beach their vessel on the muddy shore, he pulls into a tiny, unmarked inlet that’s virtually camouflaged by the night’s rippling darkness. Dense walls of vegetation rise on either side of them, with occasional gaps that allow the plantation house to increase in size as they draw nearer to it. A row of boat docks appears up ahead, well kept, but low and unobtrusive. Ryan pulls into one, kills the engine, and then jerks his head indicating they should all disembark.