CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter One Watched
Chapter Two Haunted
Chapter Three Coming Home
Chapter Four The Hardest Move
Chapter Five Dangerous to Love
Chapter Six Left
Chapter Seven A Father's Gift
Chapter Eight Pulled Apart
Chapter Nine Choices
Chapter Ten Eve
Chapter Eleven Lies
Chapter Twelve India
Chapter Thirteen Sisters Never Leave
Chapter Fourteen Burned
Chapter Fifteen Ellora
Chapter Sixteen The Hindu
Chapter Seventeen The Beginning
Chapter Eighteen Everything
Chapter Nineteen Never Letting Go
Chapter Twenty Divine Obligation
Chapter Twenty-One China
Chapter Twenty-Two On Guard
Chapter Twenty-Three False Promise
Chapter Twenty-Four Betrayed
Chapter Twenty-Five Mount Emei
Chapter Twenty-Six Golden God
Chapter Twenty-Seven All of Them
Chapter Twenty-Eight The Buddhist
Chapter Twenty-Nine Expendable
Chapter Thirty Another Bloody Failure
Chapter Thirty-One I Need You
Chapter Thirty-Two The Below
Chapter Thirty-Three Private Prison
Chapter Thirty-Four Astral
Chapter Thirty-Five Kovin
Chapter Thirty-Six I See You
Chapter Thirty-Seven Facing the Dark
Chapter Thirty-Eight Eyes Everywehere
Chapter Thirty-Nine Influence
Chapter Forty You are Here
Chapter Forty-One Ruined
Chapter Forty-Two Alone
My Readers
If You Enjoyed This Book
About the Author
Descendant
Carmen Espinoza
For those who answer the call to educate
CHAPTER ONE
Watched
I wasn’t paranoid, I had seen the man before. Not just browsing shelves in the library or scanning bar codes at the self-checker, last week he’d been behind the wheel of a brown Camry in the lane next to mine. He was following me.
I shut the book balanced on my knee and checked the small digital clock on the computer in front of me. Five minutes before I was off.
“Aaron?” I turned to the middle-aged man perched over the computer terminal next to mine.
“Hmm?” he didn’t look up from his library book.
“Do you mind if I take off early?”
He glanced briefly at his own digital computer clock before he returned to his reading and shooed me away with his hand.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah,” he said, already lost again in the library’s brand new copy of Resurrections Test, my dad’s latest installment of his Devin Kruger series.
The guy was down the hall across from us, fingering books displayed on the New Arrivals table. I avoided looking at him, tucked my book, The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, into my bag and slid off the stool.
“Bye,” I whispered as I slid my bag strap over my shoulder and rounded the counter.
Completely absorbed, Aaron didn’t say anything. I wondered what he would say if I ever decided to tell him who my father was. A woman pushing a double stroller and balancing a tower of children’s books navigated through the retractable black straps meant to control the lines of people, when there was more than one, checking out books.
“Sarah, give the man the books. He’s going to check them out to us, but just for borrowing.”
Aaron closed his book and sighed loudly. The woman didn’t register his annoyed glare; she was too busy trying to pull the picture books from her toddler’s hands without dropping her own stack. When the mom finally pried them away, Sarah started to scream and the baby in the backseat of the stroller started to cry.
Aaron’s eyes bulged while he silently watched the scene in front of him. I bit my lip and slipped quickly towards the electric doors. I wanted to get away before he changed his mind and decided to call me back to deal with the mess.
As the electric doors slid shut behind me, I dared a glance at the man near the New Arrivals. The children’s crying and screaming didn’t appear to even register to him, his attention was perfectly captured by the book in his hands—until his eyes slid over the top of his book and met mine.
I turned away and started to walk quickly across the parking lot. Fear trickled through my body making my legs feel weak. As soon as I was out of his direct eyesight, I ran to my car. My heart raced while I fumbled through my bag looking for my keys, any minute the sliding doors would open again and I would see the man come out. Franzen’s warning had echoed through my ears for the last ten months, Charlotte, they will pluck you right off the street.
I couldn’t find my keys. For one horrible moment I realized I must have left them inside. But I shook my bag and heard them jingle from somewhere deep within. I glanced up at the doors and shuffled all the contents of the bag once more. My fingers felt the sharp metal edge of a key just as the doors slid open.
My heart thundered in my ears as I pulled the keys from their hiding place and fumbled through them for the fob to unlock my door. I yanked the door handle and slid onto the driver’s seat of my Jeep just as Sarah, the screaming toddler, came darting out the library doors. A moment later her mother struggled to keep up while balancing the baby on her hip and pushing their enormous stroller piled with books.
The man was still inside. I turned the key in the Jeep’s ignition and shifted into reverse. The Jeep lurched and sped backwards, I slammed on the brake at the last second barely missing a lamppost anchored in a block of concrete. I pulled the gearshift into drive and accelerated out of the parking lot. I was driving too fast and the mother, now gripping Sarah’s arm, yelled something after me as I sped past them.
I looked apologetically into my rearview mirror—stupid Charlotte you could have run that little girl over. But there he was. Standing in front of the library doors, staring after me. I could feel his eyes long after I made the turn and raced up Venice Boulevard.
I felt their eyes everywhere.
My arms were shaking. I looked up at the last minute and slammed on my brakes for a red light. The Jeep’s front end traveled too far past the crosswalk and into the intersection. Cars crossing in front of me honked and took the time to roll down their windows to yell.
My whole body felt like it was shaking loose now—I needed to get home. It was the closest I ever felt to safe now, sitting in my room, surrounded by my four walls. But lately, even there, I had started to believe they watched. Their eyes had infiltrated every corner of my life.
The Bilderbergs.
I wasn’t paranoid. At least, I didn’t think I was.
The light changed and I gently pressed the accelerator trying to control the movement. Cars behind me began honking—I was now driving too slow. I could feel the pressure in my face building and I tried to swallow down the tears. Come on Charlotte, just get yourself home. I sped up a little but the tears still ran down my cheeks.
I was so alone.
I had thought, hoped, that after finding my mother, we would eventually be together again. For weeks after seeing her in the Heathrow Airport, I had waited for a phone call, or a letter—any word from her that indicated she and Franzen were finding a way for her to be with me, at least in regular contact with me again. But weeks morphed into months and, other than the quick note she had sent locked inside the stone puzzle box, there had been no word.
&
nbsp; I had no idea where she was, if she was okay, when or if we would ever see each other again. All I had received was a brown envelope with no address stuffed between the pages of my economics book during the first week back at school. How it got there I had no idea, but when I looked around my classroom to see if anyone was watching, waiting for my reaction, all I saw were thirty-two other kids doodling, texting under their desks, or staring out the windows while Mrs. Harris droned through her lecture on Division of Labor and Specialization. I tore away the envelope’s edge and pulled out a piece of plain printer paper. In the center was typed:
You are being watched. Phone, email, computer. Zero contact.
U.N.
When I had fist read it, I was shocked—The United Nations? Until I realized, U.N. was Uncle Nigel. But did he mean zero contact with my mother? With him? When I had first returned home from Gaersum Aern, Caleb and Sophie had emailed me almost every day since their mother, Ms. Steward, had lifted their computer and cell phone embargo. But after receiving the note in my book, I didn’t hear anything from either of them. Not a single reply to any of the many, “What’s up with you guys?” had been answered either. So I guessed Zero contact meant zero, so I stopped trying.
That was nine months ago.
I pulled my jeep, my father’s seventeenth birthday present to me, into the garage beneath our bungalow. His truck was gone. Since the release of Resurrections Test, and the huge sales success it had been, my father had been gone a lot. There had been signings, interviews, guest lecture spots—my father, at least, was alive again. But seeing as how my only friends lived over five thousand miles away, his success meant I was alone most of the time.
I opened my door and got out. When I looked up and over my shoulder, I saw the flick of the blinds in the window of the second story condo that shared our alley. Whoever lived there had moved in nine months ago and I had never seen anyone come or go from the condo except that first day when the movers parked a small truck in the alley and lifted furniture up the stairs. Since then, the movement of the blinds every time I came home had been the only indication that anyone lived there.
You are being watched.
I grabbed my bag off the passenger seat and hurried inside.
The voice mail light was blinking on the phone. I dumped my bag and keys on the kitchen table and grabbed a microwave dinner from the freezer. “Yum, turkey in gravy,” I whispered sarcastically to myself. Not that it mattered, I hardly tasted anything I ate anymore and probably only remembered to actually eat when my stomach demanded I put something in it. I checked the directions then tossed the frozen food block into the microwave and pushed the four-minute button.
While my dinner rotated, I turned to the message light. I already knew what it was—West Christian Academy’s automated attendance line with a message for the parents and/ or guardians of Charlotte Stevens. This message is to inform you that your son or daughter accrued one or more absences from school today. Please call West Christian Academy at… Before I went to my job at the Venice Beach Library this afternoon, I had, again, ditched all my afternoon classes.
It was at the beginning of the second semester that I had started to slide. There had been one missed assignment, and then a missed day, then four missed days. Lately school felt like nothing more than time consuming busy work that kept me from what I wanted to be doing—researching everything I could about the Masons, alchemy, the Bilderbergs, and my biological father, Sir Francis Bacon a.k.a. Shakespeare, the man my mother and I knew as Franzen.
Dad knew I had missed some school—but he had no idea how bad the last month had been. Luckily, I could almost always catch the messages before he heard them—I leaned over the counter and pushed the delete button without even listening to the latest one. For the last couple of weeks, Ms. Carney had been giving me doleful looks whenever she did spot me in the halls. The only thing probably stopping her from hauling me into her office again was the fact that summer break was only a week away.
Ironically, I usually ditched my afternoon classes only to sit in the West Christian computer lab because I was too paranoid to use my own computer for my personal research. I didn’t trust any of the communication devices in our home any more, they all felt like large eyes trying to capture my private world and share it with Emerick. Emerick Wriothesley, the man who wanted to know what I was up to, how much I knew, and if I planned to take up Franzen’s four hundred year old mission in the world—sharing the secrets of alchemy with all of mankind.
I wondered if Emerick realized he had nothing to worry about. In the ten months since I had returned from Gaersum Aern, in the hours I had spent crawling the Internet, searching the library shelves, I still didn’t understand any more about alchemy than I had before. Sure, I knew dates, names, important figures throughout history who had believed in and practiced alchemy—but I still didn’t know what alchemy was.
The microwave beeped loudly and I pulled out my turkey in gravy dinner. I peeled back the plastic film and stared at the lumpy mess. The directions had said something about stirring it or letting it sit but suddenly, I wasn’t hungry at all.
The door to the garage opened and I heard my dad come in. “Charlotte!” he yelled before bothering to look up and see me standing five feet away.
“I’m right here.”
“Oh,” he looked up surprised and his face broke into a huge smile.
Something wonderful had obviously happened. “What?” I asked.
“How would you like to spend the summer touring with your number one,” he held up his index finger, “bestselling father?”
“The New York Times?”
He nodded his head, “The New York Times. I’ve got tour dates set up for the whole summer.”
My brain was processing all of this and I ended up staring at him too long without the expression he was looking for.
“Aren’t you thrilled?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look thrilled.”
“No, I am…really. Where are you touring again?”
“The U.S.”
I nodded my head and tried to figure out how I was going to say what I was about to say. “How many cities?”
“Twenty-three! Can you believe it?” he opened the fridge and peered inside. “They’re begging for me.”
Twenty-three cities in three months? The idea of following him in and out of hotels while we jumped from bookstore to bookstore for the entire summer was the opposite of thrilling.
He turned to me and noticed my turkey in gravy, “Are you going to eat that?”
I looked at the now gelatinous thing sitting in the plastic tray in front of me and shook my head.
“Good,” he grabbed a fork from the drawer. “I haven’t eaten all day.” He speared a slice of turkey and took a bite.
“Dad?”
“Hum?”
“If I didn’t go…”
He looked at me wide eyed, his mouth was too full to protest. He chewed a few more times then swallowed hard. “What do you mean? I thought this would be great. You and me, traveling, touring…seeing the sights.”
Sights? What sights did he think we were going to have time to see in twenty-three cities in just three months? “Dad, you’re going to be really busy.”
“Not that busy.”
“Yes dad, that busy.”
He shoveled another mouthful of processed turkey into his mouth. “Well…” he swallowed. “I can’t just leave you here. I mean, I know you’re not a kid anymore but three months is too long.”
I already had an answer to this. “I don’t have to stay here. I could go to Somerset for the summer.”
He wrinkled his nose while he chewed, “With your Uncle Nigel?”
“With Caleb and Sophie,” I corrected.
He raised his eyebrows and seemed to consider this but then shook his head. “I’d really rather you came with me. It’s an entire summer Tot, and probably the last summer I’ll really have with you before you leave for coll
ege.”
A hot flame of annoyance ignited in my chest. “What are you talking about? I only just finished my junior year…I’ll still be here next summer.”
“Physically, maybe. But the summer after your senior year? You’ll never be home. There’ll be parties with your friends, and saying goodbye, packing and getting ready for college. You’ll be too busy for me then.”
I stared at him. Parties with my friends? The closest person I had to a friend in Venice Beach was Aaron, my middle-aged coworker at the library and all he ever did was grunt at me from behind books. The magnitude of what my dad didn’t know about me was astounding. “I can promise you, there will be no parties. I will have plenty of time to sit and wait for you,” I snapped.
He concentrated on the last piece of turkey coagulating in the now cold gravy. Neither of us was used to this. His sobriety had come with an unanticipated side effect—parental awareness. It hadn’t come up much in the last year, only once when I hadn’t been able to erase the auto absence message before he got home. We had exchanged a few rapid-fire verbal shots before I stormed off to my room with the more damaging artillery burning on my lips. You’re not even my real father! But I didn’t say it. I locked myself in my room until I calmed down.
I had been running my own show since I was twelve…I didn’t know how to deal with a participating parent.
He carefully cut the last piece of turkey with his fork and then pushed it around the tray.
I could already tell he wasn’t going to rise and do battle with me.
“I worry Tot,” he whispered.
I closed my eyes and took a breath. I worry too, I thought. I have worried for the last five years. I’ve worried about my missing mother, about you drinking yourself numb, about taking care of everything! Now I worry about things you can’t even imagine.
“I worry that it’s my fault you are the way you are.”
My eyes flew open and I glared at him, “The way I am?”
“You don’t have any friends,” he pleaded. “And what about a boyfriend? Please tell me there is someone you sneak around with because that would be fine by me. At least I would know you had someone.”
Midheaven (Ascendant Trilogy Book 2) Page 1
