Alyec nodded, leaning on his hand. “I know. I thought it would be fun or something.”
Paul and Amy looked at each other. Paul reached out his hand and squeezed hers.
“We didn’t end up doing anything to help her,” Amy finally said, frustrated. “We were supposed to be doing all this detective legwork crap, and none of it mattered….”
“If it wasn’t for your idea with the walkie-talkie, we never would have found her,” Alyec pointed out.
“We were there.” Kim looked up at all of them. “Supporting her. I think that sometimes, that’s enough.”
“One thing’s for certain,” Alyec added, stirring his coffee with a claw. “Her life is going to get even more complicated and a lot more dangerous from now on….”
Chloe and her mom sat on the couch, mostly silent. It had taken over an hour just for Chloe to tell her mother the story and another hour for Mrs. King to ask the inevitable questions.
Mrs. King got out some expensive scotch and downed a shot. She offered Chloe some, but Chloe declined, wanting cocoa instead. Mrs. King made it for her, going through the movements robotically.
“Oh, here’s your earring,” Chloe remembered, taking it out of her pocket. It gleamed dully in the light. She turned it over in her fingers, staring at it. “It’s so random…. Such a tiny chance that it fell, and that Brian found it.”
“Give your mother a little credit,” the older woman said with a wry smile, indicating how both of her ears were bare. “Every time they moved me, I dropped another piece of jewelry or whatever, hoping it might provide someone a clue as to where I was. I think I’m out about three thousand dollars’ worth of the stuff.” She handed Chloe her cocoa and shook her head.
Chloe smiled—it was still too soon to grin. I really do have the coolest mother. She couldn’t imagine Mrs. Chun or Amy’s mom thinking to do something like that. But her face darkened again as she thought about moms and the other thing she had to tell hers.
“I saw my biological mother,” she said after they had been silent for a while. “When I was, uh, dead.”
Mrs. King looked up at her through slightly glazed eyes—dim from the evening, not the drink. There were bruises and scrapes on the side of her head where the gun had been jammed against it. Her usually pixie-perfect hair was tousled, and her glasses were bent. Chloe wished she didn’t have to see her mother this way—she might have thought her mom was a perfectionist bitch sometimes, but seeing her like this was almost unbearable.
“What did she say?” her mother asked after a moment.
“She said that she was proud of me and that I should go back and rescue you—that you were my real mother, too.”
It was a difficult thing to say, but Chloe was glad she had.
Even when her mom began to cry and hug her.
They finally said good night, somehow both knowing it was safe for now. Chloe had meant every word she had said about killing whoever tried to attack her home again, and the Mai seemed to respect her now. And the Tenth Blade had something to think about.
She wearily climbed the stairs to her room, wanting desperately the hot, cleansing water of a bath but too exhausted to seriously consider the effort of running the water or waiting for it to fill.
Chloe sat on her bed, empty of all thought, trying to kick off her sneakers without bending over to untie them.
She was startled by a tap at the window.
Brian was there, his frame obscuring a surprisingly clear night full of stars. Chloe felt her stomach lurch for a moment when she saw him. There was blood on his face and hands; where he tapped, an ugly dark blotch remained.
Chloe leapt up and pushed open the window.
“Brian!” she cried. He was holding his shoulder, like there was a wound there.
A bullet wound, she realized, catching a faint odor of metal and powder. It smelled like poison to her, like death.
“Hey.” He smiled weakly. “I’m all right. Nothing too serious.”
“Come in—I can get some bandages….” He was balanced on the outside of the sill as neatly as if he were Mai, and she was afraid he would fall if he lost too much blood.
He shook his head. “I can’t. I just came to say goodbye.”
She didn’t understand; it was all over. The good guys had won—and he was a good guy.
“Why? What’s the—?”
“I’m a dead man,” he said wearily. “Richard is basically calling a fatwa on me—as a traitor to the Order. And my father refuses to protect me. You never quit the Order while you’re alive.”
“But you had no choice! You told me! Your father made you.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I said my vows when I was fourteen—and now I’m a wanted man. I have to disappear.”
Finally Chloe began to cry, streams of silent tears coursing their way down her cheeks.
“Brian, it’s not fair. You were just trying to help me. It’s all my fault….”
“Nothing is your fault, Chloe.” He reached in and grabbed her hand, squeezing it. “Nothing is your fault. You’re good, kind, and smart…. I have no doubt that you’ll make a great leader to your people.” He looked her seriously in the eye. “But you know that you’re a top to-kill on the Order’s list, right?”
“I know,” she said sadly.
“My hanging out here would only put you in more danger, Chloe.” He took his hands off hers and began to stand. “I love you,” he said, and kissed the glass near her face.
She leaned forward and kissed him back, the cold glass between them keeping him safe from her.
Then he fell into the night, disappearing into the city.
Chloe covered her face with her hands and wept.
Sergei sat at his desk, hands clasped under his chin as though he were praying. He had run a claw through his hair, fixing it, but there was blood on his cuffs from when he had taken down one of the younger members of the Order, pulling at the tendons in the boy’s neck while closing his fingers.
It had been a long time since Sergei had personally gotten involved in a fight. He had missed it—there was something incredibly stirring and visceral about protecting your people with your own body. That was one of the signs of a real leader.
A real leader knew what to do during peacetime as well, knew how to manage a modern bureaucracy to gather his people safely, to work the system and reunite families and keep them all employed and safe and hidden. He had done exactly that for the past fifteen years or so. I am a leader, he told himself, and no one is going to take that away. Certainly not some little girl from San Francisco.
He opened a drawer, using his claw to undo the lock, and took out a small, nondescript gray cell phone. He dialed a number with his thumb, claws receding.
“Hello, Alexander? First, let me offer my condolences,” he said with a chuckle, “since everyone seems to believe that you are dead.
“In other business, I thought we could help each other out again. Remember the pride leader’s daughter? The one you, ah, took care of with my … assistance? It turns out she has a sister, Chloe King. Yes, you’ve met—Yes, she’s the One….
“And I can help you find her. So you can take care of her as well.”
Chloe King has
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Check out this exciting excerpt from the second book in the witch season
quartet by Jeff Mariotte.
FALL
Kerry had just shut the journal and replaced the leather thong that held it closed when Sonya and Dougie entered, arm in arm, laughing at some joke Kerry wasn’t privy to. “Hey, Kerry,” Dougie said by way of greeting. “That doesn’t look like any textbook I’ve ever seen. What is it?”
“It’s an old journal,” Kerry replied, not wanting to reveal any more than that. Dougie annoyed her—she considere
d him a typical frat boy but without the frat, all about using his college years to drink and party and have a good time, knowing that at the end of it his degree and his father’s connections would guarantee him a good job even if he never set foot in a classroom. She didn’t quite know what Sonya saw in him, but then she didn’t know Sonya well enough to speculate.
He disentangled himself from Sonya and reached for it. “Lemme see.”
Kerry jerked it away from his grasping hands. “It’s very old,” she insisted, “and fragile.”
Dougie screwed his blunt, good-old-boy features into a mask of hurt. “Jeez, I wasn’t gonna damage it,” he declared. “I just wanted to look at it.”
“Kerry’s pretty protective of her stuff,” Sonya told him. Kerry noted her tone, as if she were talking about someone who wasn’t in the room.
“Just the stuff that needs protecting,” she countered. “This journal is almost a hundred years old, and the paper is brittle. I can’t let anything happen to it.”
“It’s okay, Kerry—chill,” Sonya chided. “No one’s going to mess with it. Dougie’s just having fun.”
“More than you are, it looks like,” Dougie added. “Looks like you need a boyfriend, Kerry. You shouldn’t be sitting around here on a Saturday night with some moldy old book.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Kerry answered, wishing he’d just go away. She sat on her bed and picked up BoBo, her old childhood rag-doll clown. “I’m fine.”
“Tell you the truth, Kerry,” Sonya said, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial level, “we were kind of hoping you had gone out for a while, if you know what I mean.”
Sonya’s meaning couldn’t have been more clear. But do I want to do her that favor? Kerry asked herself. Do I want to clear out of my own room so she and her horndog boyfriend can have their fun … and maybe paw through my stuff—even Daniel’s journals—when they’re done?
Resigned, she gathered up the things she’d need to spend an hour in the common area. For about the millionth time since the semester had started, she wished she had a private room.
By the time she had settled on one of the couches in the third-floor lounge, Kerry was fuming. Two girls she knew vaguely shared another couch and spoke in hushed tones about a project they were working on together, but blessedly the TV was off and the faint smell of microwave popcorn that hung in the air when she entered dissipated quickly. She made it clear that she was there to study, not socialize, and she buried herself in the American history text that she should have been reading instead of Daniel’s journal. The words seemed dry and lifeless to her, though, especially compared to the journals, or even more, to Daniel’s voice, telling her things about her nation’s past that had never made it into the history books.
Kerry was trying, really and truly, to immerse herself in school, to put Daniel and Season and the rest of it behind her. And Kerry was someone who did what she put her mind to—they hadn’t called her Bulldog over the summer for nothing. So why couldn’t she just focus on the work? Why did images of Daniel pop up, unbidden, every time her mind wandered? Why did she keep seeing Season in every blond woman on campus?
The whole situation was just incredibly frustrating. She turned back to the history text and tried to read about the landing at Plymouth Rock, but the words just turned to fuzz before her eyes.
Daniel was there, in her dream, looking just as he had in life. His long-sleeved white shirt was clean and crisp, tucked into faded jeans, the sleeves rolled back a couple of times over muscular forearms. His hair was long and windblown, and he was laughing, head thrown back, mouth open, teeth even and white, gray eyes crinkled at the corners and dimples etched into his cheeks. He stood on a hill, at a slight distance from Kerry; she couldn’t reach him or even hear his laughter, which should have been booming.
She moved closer to him, or tried to. But for every step forward she took, the hilltop on which he stood seemed to move back. She tried calling out to him, shouting his name, but even her own voice vanished before it reached her ears.
Then a fog rolled in, as if from offshore—thick and wet, blotting out the view, blocking Daniel, then the entire hillside. Within seconds Kerry was alone, an island in a sea of white mist. Then even she was gone, the mist breaking her body into ever smaller chunks until it had disappeared completely.
Kerry Profitt’s diary, October 21.
And again with the nightmares, now. All I need, right? Having gotten rid of them once—thanks, I am now convinced, to the appearance of Daniel in my life—they are back, and, it seems, with a vengeance. This one wasn’t even all that scary in itself—I mean, the imagery wasn’t—but the overall feel of it creeped me out big time. Especially the way that Daniel was there, and then he wasn’t, and …
Oh, never mind. It’s different from the dreams I used to have, which I forgot as soon as they ended. And a year from now I won’t remember what the dream was, and this entry will make no sense.
Which distinguishes it from the rest of my life how, exactly?
Now Sonya is sleeping hard and I am wide awake, pretty much giving up on the idea of sleeping tonight. Fortunately the laptop screen gives off enough light so I can type without turning on a light and waking her highness. And since it’s fresh in my mind, I can’t stop thinking about the dream.
Its meaning? Obvious, I think. I miss Daniel. He was taken from me. Duh. Bonehead psych, no brainer.
The part where I disappear? A little tougher, that. Losing my identity? Maybe.
And maybe I should e-mail Brandy for a more comprehensive analysis. She’s the Doc, after all. I have her addy—we all have each other’s, and have sent a few around since splitting up back in SD after the summer. But not as much as I thought we might, almost as if everyone wants to forget what happened, wants to leave Season and Daniel and the summer of our discontent well behind.
And really, who can blame ’em for that? It pretty much sucked. Find a great guy, and he dies. Find out witchcraft is real and scarier than you ever imagined, and the baddest witch around has it in for your new BF. Find out he’s been chasing her for almost 300 years, so you help him catch her, only to watch her kill him.
Yeah, summer means fun.
Okay, here’s the thing. School is just not happening for me. Sonya … ditto. Aunt Betty and Uncle Marsh check in from time to time, but I could be gone from here for a month before they knew it. So really, what’s keeping me here? Lack of someplace better to go?
Only, see, I have an idea about that too.
I’ve been reading Daniel’s journals. That’s just about the only thing that’s held my interest, in fact. And Daniel is lost to me.
But that doesn’t mean that part of my life has to be lost. Mother Blessing is out there, in the Great Dismal Swamp. Season Howe is out there too, still at large, and now owing for yet another crime.
One that I take just a little bit personally.
So here’s my theory. I find Mother Blessing, convince her to teach me witchcraft, and then I hunt down Season Howe and give her what she deserves.
Nothing to it, right?
But did I mention people call me Bulldog?
More later.
K.
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A series by Meg Cabot, writing as Jenny Carroll
She can run, but she can’t hide.
Just because her best friend wants to exercise, Jessica Mastriani agrees to walk the two miles home from their high school. Straight into a huge Indiana thunderstorm.
And straight into trouble. Serious trouble.
Because somehow on that long walk home, Jessica acquired a newfound talent. An amazing power that can be used for good … or for evil.
Run, Jessica. Run.
&nbs
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THE END OF AN ERA IS NEAR…. BE AFRAID.
YOU’VE WATCHED GAIA BREAK LEGS.
YOU’VE WATCHED HER BET HER HEART BROKEN.
BUT YOU’VE NEVER BEEN HER BREAK FREE QUITE LIKE THIS.
GAIA’S HIGH SCHOOL DAYS ARE NUMBERED. AND ONCE THEY’VE RUN OUT, GAIA WILL MAKE HER MOST DANGEROUS CHOICE YET.
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BODY OF EVIDENCE
Thrillers starring Jenna Blake
“The first day at college, my professor dropped dead. The second day, I assisted of his autopsy. Let’s hope I don’t have to go through four years of this….”
When Jenna Blake starts her freshman year at Somerset University, it’s an exciting time, filled with new faces and new challenges, not to mention parties and guys and … a job interview with the medical examiner that takes place in the middle of an autopsy! As Jenna starts her new job, she is drawn into a web of dangerous politics and deadly disease … a web that will bring her face-to-face with a pair of killers: one medical, and one all too human.
Body Bags
Thief of Hearts
Soul Survivor
Meets the Eye