The Caelian Cycle Boxed Set

by Donnielle Tyner

  “Quit being paranoid and get in the car. Normal people don’t glare at their surroundings before getting in a taxi,” Rebecca hissed.

  Disheartened, I got inside. “We’re not normal people. We’re Caelians.”

  “You know what I meant,” Rebecca replied the same time as Madison spoke to the driver. “The mall, please.”

  The two looked at each other and laughed.

  “I do, but in the world we live in, you can’t be too careful.” I shrugged and turned to watch the buildings fly by as the taxi sped toward the shopping center.

  Soft music filled the car as conversation lulled. It was peaceful for a brief moment until the chimes announcing breaking news resounded, causing Rebecca to squeak.

  The Armistice Conference continues between German and Japanese leaders today. Although war has not officially been declared between the two super powers, they continue their embargos on tradable goods on both sides. Japanese and British leaders have come to a trade agreement that will benefit Britain financially and will guarantee their support of Japan if war ensues. German Chief Nadine Richter has officially reached out to the Caelian Families Solas, Lane, and Moreau for assistance if this stalemate with Japan evolves into war. Spokespeople from all three families have announced that they will not involve themselves due to the United States policy of non-interference. The action of Chief Richter has ignited protests on Capitol Hill today, led by the Human Purist Coalition. The coalition has been under intense scrutiny as of late. Hate crimes against Caelians across the country have been attributed to the group, but no evidence to support these claims has been uncovered.

  In other news, the Lane family has officially allied themselves with the Order of Caelum and announced both groups are pursuing peace for humankind with help from Koenig’s GenCorp. The vague statement has ignited intense discussions on both sides of the Caelian/Norm debate.

  President Levin has met with each of the Caelian family leaders and is supporting their drive for full equal rights . . .

  “Well, at least our president supports lifting the Talent suppression act,” Madison spoke.

  “I hope that is enough,” Rebecca agreed. “Imagine a world where we won’t have laws telling us what we can and cannot do and allowing us to live in true freedom.”

  I shrugged. “I can’t imagine it. There’s too much hate in the world.”

  “Do you think there will be a second great war?” Rebecca asked.

  “Looks that way,” Madison replied. She pursed her lips, considering her next statement. “Let’s hope the president can push the removal of the Talent suppression act before war begins.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Okay! We’re here. No more politics. It’s happy fun time!” Rebecca announced as the taxi pulled up to the entrance of the mall.

  The large, upscale mall was one of the few public places safe enough for Caelians to mingle among norms. Three of the four levels were underground with a large glass dome ceiling allowing in plenty of natural light. It boasted a year-round ice skating rink, fine dining, and designer shops you wouldn’t find at any run of the mill mall. There were no greasy cardboard pizza joints or Old Navys here.

  We spent hours walking around the mall and with each minute that passed, I was able to forget my unease. Rebecca and Madison seemed to purchase everything they tried on. I decided on a few items, but wasn’t as eager to purchase as the other girls. Laden with armfuls of bags, we decided it was time to eat.

  “Let’s get sushi!” I suggested. “They never offer it at Vincent’s.”

  “Yum! That sounds amazing,” Rebecca squealed as she bounced toward the Japanese restaurant.

  “She’s full of energy,” I noted. The feeling of being watched returned and I covertly began glancing around.

  “Mmmm.”

  I turned to Madison and her lips were quirked in a playful smile as she texted with someone, completely ignoring the world outside her phone. Without her knowledge, I peeked over her shoulder and noticed she was flirting via text with John. The thought of the two of them getting together filled me with joy. It was about time they moved beyond the passive aggressive banter. I nudged her in the ribs.

  “What?” She massaged her side.

  “Oh nothing. I was just noticing how Rebecca seems to have an excess of energy today.”

  “Of course she is. She charmed that poor boy to carry her bags for her,” Madison stated as she pointed to a cute, red-haired Caelian boy dutifully following Rebecca.

  “You don’t think she’s abusing her Talent, do you?” I asked cautiously. “I mean, he approached her as soon as she stepped out of the second floor and offered to carry her bags.”

  “No. Her Talent just attracts people, but she’s going to get in trouble one day if she doesn’t stop encouraging them.” She ran her hands through her short orange hair, worry and anger marring her beautiful, pixie-like face.

  I nodded in agreement. We’d all heard of stalkers who had gone too far when it came to others who possessed the siren Talent.

  Rebecca and the love-struck boy were already seated when Madison and I arrived. We sat down and after a hurried deliberation, ordered a large sushi platter to share. I was just settling in, relishing the relief I felt from standing for hours, when the feeling of being watched returned. My spine straightened with a snap. Whoever it was, they were close.

  Madison was looking at me with curiosity. She’d noticed the sudden change in my mood. I leaned in and whispered, “I’m not crazy, but I swear I’m being watched.”

  She looked at me again and after some internal debate, she nodded and turned back to Rebecca, who hadn’t stopped talking about her latest endeavor with Saint Vincent’s charity fashion club, Couture Cares, to breathe, much less notice anything else. I did an internal happy dance. One of my friends believed me.

  Our food arrived and we all dug in. I had a hard time focusing on eating when I knew someone was watching, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by scanning the room every few minutes like I wanted to.

  “Hey Sadie, that guy has been staring at you.” The boy, whose name escaped me, spoke up and nodded to an area behind me. My mouth fell open, shocked he knew my name and that he brought attention to the table of someone watching me.

  “Where, Jesse?” Rebecca asked, stretching as high as she could while still seated, turning her whole body in order to search for someone in the restaurant.

  “Stop! Stop, Rebecca,” I hissed.

  She stopped and looked at me with curiosity. “What?”

  “Just don’t draw attention to us, okay?” I demanded. “Try to locate him without making it so obvious.”

  She nodded and began her search between bites of sushi. I knew she had located him when she squinted for a brief moment before her lips lifted into a smug grin.

  “Who is it?” Madison asked. She had gone into protection mode and I felt the heat radiating off her body in response. Her face was focused as she struggled to rein in her Talent before she broke the law by using it in public.

  I laid my hand on her arm, wincing at the uncomfortable heat. “Hey, it’s okay,” I cooed, attempting to soothe her.

  Her face smoothed as she calmed down and the heat left her. The table breathed a unified sigh of relief.

  Rebecca turned to look at me. “Would you like for me to describe the fine-looking guy checking you out?” Jesse winced and pinched his face at Rebecca’s description of my stalker. I made a mental note to talk to her about him.

  “Sure,” I sighed.

  Her eyes grew wide in anticipation and I knew I wouldn’t like what I was about to hear. “Tall. Black shirt that stretches across his muscular chest. Sexy smirk on full lips.” She paused, enjoying my torture. A part of me knew who she was talking about, but the other part didn’t want to believe it. “Shaggy golden hair and mauve eyes that have been locked on you this whole time.”

  “Kian,” I mumbled.

  At the sound of his name, Madison spu
n around to look at him. She gasped. “Sadie, you were holding back with your description.”

  I felt the heat rise up my neck and knew my face was red from embarrassment. I couldn’t believe he found me here. Was it him I felt outside Saint Vincent’s too?

  “What do you think he wants?” I asked.

  “Well if the way he’s looking at you is any indication…” Rebecca began.

  I threw up my hands. “Stop. No. I don’t want to even go there.”

  “Why not?” Madison asked seriously. “You know it’s okay to move on. No one will judge you. Not even Lacy and Michael. As a matter of fact, I’m sure they would encourage it.”

  “Not with him. You should have seen the way Michael reacted when Kian was talking to me at the party. Michael does not like Kian and if Michael doesn’t trust him, why should I?” I reasoned.

  Curiosity was warring within me. I wanted to turn and look at Kian, but I knew it would give him an open invitation to approach me. I didn’t want that. Did I?

  The need to look at him won and I turned around in my seat. Sure enough, across the restaurant Kian sat in a corner booth, eyes locked on me. When he noticed me looking his face fell in frustration.

  Madison whistled. “Well that was sudden.”

  “I wonder what his problem is,” I asked, feeling myself get angry. “He’s the one following me and staring at me from dark corners.” My fists clenched in forced restraint, and soon after, a tentative vibration permeated my entire body before exploding outward. I could feel fluctuations saturating the air around me. The vibrations were varied, each unique from the next and concentrated on each Caelian in the room. Then it hit me. These pulses were their Talents.

  Frightened, I jumped up and ran, leaving Madison and Rebecca screaming in my wake. My lungs burned as I ran. It felt as if I was running through molasses. Every time I approached a Caelian, their Talent reached out to me. Each Talent tasted unique on my tongue.

  I reached the employees’ hallway and stopped to catch my breath. Relieved of the burden of feeling everyone’s Talents, my brain spun, trying to associate this new development with any known Talents. I couldn’t come up with one. I fought within myself. All Talents had been studied and recorded for at least two generations, so there had to be a record somewhere. Unless.

  “No,” I said out loud as I griped my head in my hands. “No. No. No,” I moaned in disbelief, but it had to be true. For the first time in over 50 years, I had obtained an undiscovered Talent.

  Chapter 8

  My legs gave out and I fell to the floor and tucked my face into my knees. What would happen to me? Would I be moved to a lab? Whether I went to one of the families or the government would be determined, but I wouldn’t have a normal life.

  I am a freak.

  Vibrations pressed against me with unconstrained vigor as someone approached. I cocked my head to the side trying to place them without looking. Whoever it was didn’t feel like any of the people who were at my table at the restaurant.

  The presence increased as it moved closer. With each step, their Talent pressed against me with a corporeal weight. The raw strength of their Talent threatened to overwhelm me as they slid down the concrete wall, sitting next to me, our thighs just a breath apart. My body had a visceral reaction to the power radiating from every inch of their frame and in an instant I knew who it was. His Talent once again pressed against me, unyielding and fierce and for a brief moment, I wondered what it was.

  “What do you want, Kian?” I asked without looking at him.

  “How did you know it was me?” he replied, his voice laced with curiosity.

  “Why are you here?” I demanded, my voice rising as the fear and anger burst forward. “I can’t figure you out. You seem to like me. You follow me around. Then you scowl at me from some corner. What do you want?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. Silence stretched and I raised my head to look him in the eyes. He was staring at me, his face a battleground of emotions. Annoyed, I jumped up to return to my friends. “Forget it.”

  “No!” He reached out to grab my hand. “Please sit down.”

  The pleading in his voice is what stopped me. I relented and returned to my seat next to him. He kept his hold on my hand as he continued. “I spent half my life on a farm with my norm grandmother. My parents are both Caelian, but they respected my decision to live with my norm family even though they despised my desire to do so. My grandmother worked with a few Caelian families before she retired and she would tell me stories about them. The families aren’t inherently bad, but they have flaws. When I turned 17, they began recruiting me. My parents pressured me to join their family, but I wasn’t interested and turned them all down in order to stay with my grandmother. She passed away a few months after my 18th birthday.”

  He paused, running his hand through his goldenrod hair and causing some of the shorter pieces to stick out haphazardly.

  “By law, I couldn’t inherit her land or money. It went to my norm cousins, and they kicked me out of my home at once. Without a home or a Caelian family to support me, I had to improvise in order to stay alive. So I became an apprentice to a bounty hunter. Usually, jobs consist of finding useful or rare Talents. Sometimes their requests are more physical in nature.” His muscles flexed with unintentional vitality and at the same time the vibrations from his Talent nudged against me as if it wanted to bring attention to itself.

  “You’re a strength Talent,” I whispered.

  “How’d you guess?” He asked, genuinely shocked. “Never mind. You’ll tell me later.” I shrugged in reply.

  He continued, his voice losing its wistfulness, “I was at the HCA frat party to meet with someone about a job. Then I saw you.”

  “Me? I don’t have a Talent.” My voice shook from the lie and I hoped he would write it off as nerves.

  “Have you heard the story about the Director of the Koenig family’s only child?”

  “My orphanage is run by the Moreau family, so they don’t teach us anything about the Koenig family except the basics: they’re a new family – only 30 years old, their business is genetics, and they tend to be Caelian radicals, believing along the lines of the Order of Caelum that Caelians are the next evolutionary step for humankind. Unlike the order, they’re extremists. Other than that, I have no clue about the Koenigs.”

  He nodded, “most people don’t know much about them unless they’re directly involved. They’re secretive and only hire freelancers like myself once in a blue moon, but I’ve worked with them once and that particular job was vile enough that I chose to never work with them again.” His gaze focused on the paint chipped wall opposite of us as he relived buried memories.

  His confession piqued my curiosity and I turned to look at him. My eyes connected with his as he finished moving his gaze over my face, studying me again. His lips pinched in conclusion to some internal debate.

  “On that particular assignment, I was assigned with two other Caelians associated with the Koenig family. This particular assignment was lengthy, so I ended up spending a lot of down time with the two men traveling with me. They would tell stories about the Director and his son. After years of working with his father, Adrian Koenig changed his views. He didn’t agree with the policies of his father’s genetic studies or with his politics. Adrian contacted a rival family and agreed to share secrets and provide proof of his father’s crimes against Caelians and Norms if they would provide sanctuary. Director Koenig found out before his son could betray him and he had his own son murdered.”

  I gasped. Caelian violence was rare and almost always was in self-defense.

  “When the peacekeepers approached the Director, he claimed it was self-defense and wasn’t charged. A couple months later, Adrian’s contact within the other family died. From childbirth.”

  Kian’s eyes widened as he willed me to understand something. My eyebrows pinched together, it was obvious that Adrian and his contact had had an affair, but I didn’t see how any of it connecte
d with me.

  “What happened to Adrian’s baby?” I asked.

  “No one knows if the baby was really Adrian’s, but the child and her mother’s friend went missing the same night. Everyone thinks the friend ran off with the baby.”

  “But why would she do that? That’s dangerous.”

  “Why indeed,” Kian continued. “The men in the Koenig family believe the baby was Adrian’s and the members of the Koenig family are always on the lookout for a child who resembles Adrian.”

  “That’s insane. Genetics are not an exact science. You can have a child who looks more like their cousins or grandparents than their parents.” His story, although interesting, was taking us nowhere.

  “Caelian genes have only been around for one century compared to the norms’ thousands. As a new race, nature hasn’t had the chance to cull and disperse our genes as much. So it’s not impossible when Adrian’s most prominent feature was his golden skin.”

  The air whooshed out of me as if I were punched in the gut. Did Kian just suggest what I thought he did? My lungs struggled to take in air and my head danced from the lack of air.

  “I never gave it much thought until I saw you at the party. At first I thought it was coincidence, but after you left, I located a picture of Adrian and you look a lot like him.” Kian produced a picture from his pocket. The man was handsome with the same golden skin as mine. His hair was cut short and it looked black except where the flash from the camera produced a deep purple color that matched his eyes. He looked to be in his early twenties in this photo, and I assumed by the lab coat that he was a scientist in his father’s corporation.

  I stood gasping for air. There was no way I was related to the Director of the Koenig family. If Kian’s story was true, he murdered his own son. Would he come after me? Kian had said he wouldn’t work for the Koenig family again, but as an independent Caelian, money would be hard won and the demand of money can make a good person choose to do despicable things. Was Kian here to take me to them?