“Okay,” Cami said, as Alistair came out of the kitchen with her breakfast. “So, what you’re telling me is that you want me to stay here for a week, so you can test me and whatever else to verify that I inherited some gene from my father—who I never met, but you guys seem to know all about.”
“Here,” Alistair said, stepping around the couch and offering Cami the tray. “I figured you’d probably want coffee too.” She looked at him skeptically for a moment and then took the offered food and drink.
“That is basically it,” Elijah said in response to her question.
“I’m curious as to what comes next, if it turns out I do have whatever trait it is my father might have given me,” Cami said, adding sugar and milk to her coffee in quick, fluid movements. Alistair went back to the seat he’d vacated, watching her intently.
“It’s a good question,” he pointed out to Nicholas. His cousin shot him a brief, baleful look.
“From there, we would—if you wanted—introduce you more formally to the secret society we all belong to, that your father belonged to,” Nicholas replied.
“Fair warning: most of the people in it are kind of dicks,” Dylan commented from his chair. “On the other hand, we’re in it.”
“Right now, that looks more like proof of the first part than a contradiction to it,” Cami said.
“Hey: I’m offering to pay you sixty grand-plus to hang out for a week and get some tests done,” Dylan pointed out.
“You also are an accomplice in my kidnapping, so I feel like the generosity makes that a wash,” Cami countered. She sipped her coffee and started in on her pizza, and Alistair looked around the room to get a general feeling for how things were going. Dylan was his usual languid self, Nicholas was tense, and Elijah was somewhere in between. All in all, about how you’d expect at this point, Alistair mused.
“The good thing about all this is that if it turns out you did inherit your father’s traits, you stand to gain a lot more than what Dylan is going to pay you,” Nicholas said.
“Oh?” Cami folded over the slice of cheese pizza in her hand in half, and took a bigger bite of it, sucking in a few breaths to cool the hot toppings.
“It is a secret society,” Nicholas said. “But if you did decide to be inducted into it, you’d benefit from the connections, and—since you’d be someone rare and important—a lot of people would be interested in making sure your life is as easy and luxurious as possible.”
“I’m getting kind of a weird vibe here again,” Cami said after she’d finished chewing and swallowed. She set the tray aside, and Alistair had another good opportunity—not nearly his first—to look at her. Next to him and his cousins, she was almost petite, and the antique pajama set, along with her small, bare feet, only added to the sense of her daintiness. Her hair was messy, and there were some smudges of mascara and eyeliner where he hadn’t been able to entirely clean it off of her face the night before, but her hazel eyes were clear and just as intriguing as they’d been when he’d spotted her at the club.
He hadn’t lied when he’d told Nicholas that he couldn’t bring himself to risk letting Cami go. Alistair hadn’t exactly intended on kidnapping the woman, but as soon as he’d begun dancing with her, interacting with her, he’d felt the resonance of her—something that he’d been trained to seek out not just because of the prophecy but as a marker of one of their kind. The other three, Alistair knew, had to sense it too, all in their own ways. If they could convince Cami to stay with them for a week, that feeling would only intensify; as her latent traits started to awaken, it would become obvious to any of their kind what Cami was.
“Nicholas mentioned the prophecy,” Elijah said, and Alistair raised an eyebrow at his cousin. Were they really going to risk talking more about the prophecy than strictly necessary?
“Yeah, that’s also giving me kind of a culty vibe,” Cami said. “Any of you want to make that sound a little less like you’re going to tie me to an altar and ritually impregnate me or something?”
Alistair pressed his lips together, trying not to betray any of what he was thinking on his face. Well, we wouldn’t tie you up to anything, he thought.
“Before you were born, our clans were already starting to decline,” Nicholas said. “Your father was the last of his bloodline, the last one to show the particular traits our kind needs.”
“Side note: you’re going to need to clarify your ‘kind’ beyond saying you belong to a secret society because this is still striking me very much as some kind ofracial or ethnic thing,” Cami said.
“We will,” Nicholas said. “But the thing is, the particular traits your father had—that we hope you have—aren’t active in the men of our kind.”
“This is getting sketchier,” Cami told them.
Alistair suppressed a chuckle. He had to admit that it would have been easier, in a way, to just tell her the whole truth in one; but there was no way that she was going to believe the whole truth at once. It was definitely difficult to hedge around who and what they were, while getting Cami to understand why they needed her to stay with them.
“The men can carry the trait, but they can’t fully manifest it,” Nicholas said. “Only the women of our kind can.”
“So, why didn’t whoever my father’s parents were work really hard to have daughters?” Cami asked.
“They did, and they had two daughters,” Alistair said. “Both of them died before the age of 21. In a car accident, I think.”
“Well, that sucks,” Cami said. She picked up the coffee from her tray and took another long sip. “So, explain to me what exactly your ‘kind’ is, please.”
Nicholas looked at Alistair, and then the other two. “You are one of our kind, as well,” Nicholas said. “You don’t know it yet, but you’ll find out.”
“Okay,” Cami said. She looked around at the four of them. “Still need an explanation.”
“We—and you—are supernaturals,” Nicholas said.
Cami’s eyes went wide. “Yeah, could one of you grab my phone? I need to call my friends and let them know I didn’t diealso call the police and tell them that I’m being held in a weird mansion with a bunch of magic cult members,” Cami said.
“Will you let up on the cult thing?” Dylan rose to his feet, and Alistair caught the fleeting surprise on Cami’s face at just how tall his cousin was. Dylan was the tallest of all of them, almost 6’7”, and his rail-thin body only made him look taller and more birdlike. “It’s not a cult; we’re not in some ‘make America white again’ group, and if you need proof” Dylan tossed his phone onto the chair and held out his hands. In an instant, twin jets of fire appeared on his palms, starting out about an inch or two in height and rapidly shooting up to five inches.
Alistair looked at Cami. She stared, transfixed by the sight of two flames large enough to be dangerous just standing on the palms of his cousin’s hands. I probably would be too, Alistair thought, putting himself—as much as he could—in Cami’s place.
“Before you say anything about it being a magic trick,” Elijah chimed in, “notice he didn’t clap his hands or anything like that. And if it was flash paper or whatever, it’d be out by now.”
“Or burning him,” Alistair pointed out.
Cami stared for a few seconds more and then reluctantly tore her gaze away from Dylan, who was in no real hurry to put away the fire. “Are you saying you can all do that? That I—wait, are you saying I could do that?”
Nicholas shrugged at her question. “We can all do something like that to varying degrees,” Nicholas said. “If you decide to join our kind, you’ll learn probably a similar trick.”
“But how? I’ve never been able to do anything like that before,” Cami said. Nicholas glanced at Alistair.
“If it turns out that you have the genetics we think you do” Alistair said, hedging around the question as best as he could. “Then, we’ll teach you how to activate the latent abilities.”
Cami glanced at Dylan once m
ore; the fires still weren’t out. Alistair knew his cousin could keep them going for a good ten minutes before the concentration and energy needed to create the fires started to ebb.
“Put it out,” Cami said. “You’ve proven your point to me. You’re some kind of fire wizards.” Alistair resisted the urge to laugh because he knew that if he did, there’d only be more questions.
“Something along those lines,” Nicholas said. “So, will you agree to stay with us for the week?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Cami
Cami pressed her lips together. The coffee and a few bites of pizza had helped with the headache she’d gotten from her night of drinking, and she had to admit that other than knowing that at least two men had seen her mostly—if not entirely—naked without her knowledge the night before, she had largely been unharmed. They were offering to pay her one and a half times her annual salary to stay with them for a week; Cami would have entertained doubts about that offer, but given that she had just seen the man who had made the offer holding spontaneous fire in both of his hands, with no obvious source for the fire or discomfort on his part, she was more inclined to believe he might have the kind of money to make that offer.
“Let me make sure I understand what’s going on here,” Cami said, setting her coffee aside once more. “You four belong to a clan of some kind and are members of some form of supernatural race.”
“Yes,” Elijah said. The other three nodded their agreement with that point.
“You know or at least have heard about my father, in spite of the fact that my mother left him while she was pregnant with me, and I’ve never had any connection to him,” Cami continued.
“Dylan met him a few times when he was young; the rest of us just know of him,” Nicholas confirmed.
“You got my name out of some kind of prophecy about me being the savior of your ‘kind,’” Cami said. That part made her the most dubious; although, having seen the fire trick, she was less skeptical on the subject of prophecies in general.
“We got who you were,” Elijah explained. “The daughter of Finn Keane. We tracked it down a little bit and got confirmation from the prophet that the name was right, but there are several people with the same name in the world.”
“It can’t be that common a name,” Cami countered.
“There are seven billion plus people out there,” Dylan said. “There are only so many name combinations. I think there’s maybe four in the US?”
“Another five scattered around different islands,” Alistair added.
“Then about a half dozen more in other places,” Nicholas finished. “Less than 20 in the world.”
“I guess being one of twenty in seven billion isn’t too bad,” Cami mused.
“We also were fairly confident that your mother didn’t take you out of the country,” Elijah pointed out. “I mean, she could have. But we didn’t think she would.”
“So, if I’m so all-important to whatever-your-kind is, how come this is the first I’ve heard about it?” Cami looked around the room. The four men were exchanging glances, and she knew that there was a lot that she wasn’t being told.
“The prophecy is specific to our family,” Nicholas said. “We think—but we don’t know—that your mother left your father because it came out around that time, and there was a hope that you could be brought into our family at some point.”
Cami stared at him for a long moment, her mind working through what he was saying. “Are you suggesting that there was going to be some kind of arranged marriage situation?”
Nicholas shrugged. “Not exactly,” he said. “Or at least, that wasn’t the only possible outcome. But we think your mother left because—understandably—she didn’t want anything like that for you.”
“Also, we’re pretty sure your father didn’t exactly tell your mom about what he was before he knocked her up,” Dylan chimed in.
Cami brought her hands up to her face, covering her eyes and taking a slow, deep breath to try and make sense of everything that had happened since she’d awakened in a strange bed, in clothes that didn’t belong to her.
“Okay,” she said. She opened her mouth to say more, but nothing else came out. “Okay,” she said again.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” Alistair said.
Cami laughed, tilting her head back and peering up through her fingers to see that the ceiling of the room was just as ornate as everything else she’d seen in the house so far: there was a massive skylight directly overhead, and around it, a fresco of highly detailed dragons in different flight positions.
“Okay,” Cami began again. She took her hands away from her face and looked at the four men. “So, what you’re saying is that you need me to stay here for a week so you can figure out if I really am the savior of your kind, through some kind of series of tests and things. And then, we’llwell, you haven’t actually said what will happen after that, except that it will potentially involve me joining the secret society you belong to.”
The four men nodded.
“Once we’ve confirmed you have the traits from your father, we can start introducing you,” Elijah said. “And we can start teaching you more about what you inherited from your dad.”
“And for all this, you’re going to pay me something like sixty-six grand?” Cami asked, looking at Dylan.
He was seated once more, his legs folded up on the seat, his feet peeking out from the bottoms of his pajama pants. “Just finished setting up the escrow,” he said, holding out his phone. “Want to check and see if it’s legit?”
“How could you set something like that up without my banking details?” Cami frowned.
“Because you’d have to go and set them up at the bank yourself, after the week is over,” Dylan explained. “But you can check; it’s through Deutsche Bank.”
Cami stood and walked the few paces to where Dylan sat. She could feel all four men’s eyes on her, their attention boring into her with an intensity she hadn’t experienced since the one time she’d performed a strip tease for her college boyfriend on his birthday. Of course, that had only been one pair of eyes on her.
She checked the site that Dylan had pulled up; it was definitely Deutsche Bank, and it was definitely an escrow account he’d managed to set up silently, while they had been discussing everything. It was set up to provide $5,500 per month, with the first availability the following Saturday. Everything about it—at least what she could check within a few moments—seemed to check out.
“Fine,” Cami said, handing the phone back to him. For a brief few seconds, her fingertips connected with Dylan’s, and Cami was reminded of the shock that had jolted her the night before, when she had been dancing with Alistair. “One thing I want some more details on: you keep claiming you didn’t drug me, but I definitely didn’t just naturally fall asleep in the back of an Uber and not wake up until this morning.” She looked at the guilty party.
“I didn’t put anything in your drink or drug you in any way,” Alistair said.
“I think we should probably tell her a little more about us,” Elijah commented from his perch a few feet away.
Cami went back to her seat and picked up her second piece of pizza. “Please do,” she said. She looked at Nicholas and then Alistair, hoping one of the two of them would give some kind of answer.
“In addition to certain fire tricks, each one of us has certainparticular talents,” Nicholas said. “And once you start to come into your abilities, that’s what I was talking about earlier. Alistair’s talent is a kind of hypnosis.”
“It happens when I sing,” Alistair explained.
Cami scowled at him. “That’s not exactly better than drugging me,” she pointed out.
“There’s no chemicals in your system,” Alistair said. “The only thing I did was make you fall asleep.”
“You still basically rendered me unconscious,” Cami countered. “Just because you did it with magical hypnosis powers doesn’t mean it was ethical!”
<
br /> “On the bright side, as you come into your own abilities, you’ll be able to resist it more,” Dylan told her. “Good reason to stick with us.”
Cami scowled all around.
“I couldn’t just let you walk away,” Alistair explained. “I know it was wrong. I’m sorry. But I’d finally found you after we’ve spent years looking for you, especially in the last six months or so since your father died.”
“My father died six months ago?” Cami looked around the room.
“There were hopes that he might have another child before that,” Nicholas explained. “If he had, there would be a decent chance that that child would inherit his abilities, but it just never really happened.”
“I don’t think he tried all that hard,” Dylan said.
“He actually loved your mother a lot,” Elijah told her. “When she left him, he kind of”
“Gave up,” Alistair finished. “He didn’t seek you out, even though the Elders really wanted him to, given the prophecy and all. He said that if your mother wanted to raise you outside of all this, that was her right, and he wouldn’t do anything to try and force her or you into it.”
“So far, in spite of the fact that I never met him, he sounds better than the rest of you,” Cami said. She put the remainder of her pizza down and pushed the tray away. “I need some time to think.”
She stood and then realized she didn’t really have anywhere to go in the house; she had no idea where she was or how far from her own apartment she was. A part of her very much wanted to be back in her apartment, telling Jessica about the absurd outcome of her night; but in spite of how jumbled up her emotions were at the various things she’d been told in short order, Cami wasn’t certain she wanted to reject the offer outright. Beyond the money consideration, there was the fact that at least one of the men in the room had met her father a few times; the men who had abducted her were the only link she had to a man who she had gone her entire life not knowing. He had died without her ever knowing more than his name.
House Of Dragons (The Cami Bakersfield Saga Book 1) Page 4
