by Jaime Rush
His target. He couldn’t get too personal, couldn’t think of his kids or even what the man was enduring. Any emotional tie brought that black mass…the abyss. He took in the man tied to a chair, looking more haggard than in his picture. Two other men were in the room. One man walked closer to the target, blocking the view. The man screamed.
Nicholas lurched out of the mission, sucking in deep breaths. “I found him.”
Olivia walked into the huge kitchen, finding it deserted. Perfect. Given the nature of the program, the staff was limited to the essentials, which included a housekeeper but not a cook. The residents had use of the stocked kitchen. She pushed away the reprimand she’d just gotten and pulled out the cakes sitting on racks to cool. She’d played it safe, choosing chocolate.
“Story of your life, Olivia,” she muttered as she began to make icing between the layers. A grin spread down to her stomach as she carved the cake.
She rolled out a sheet of blue fondant and draped it over the cake, which was shaped like a pyramid. She trimmed, then went to work applying the thinner pieces of fondant that were cut into abstract, colorful shapes.
If she’d had some fireworks, or platforms and motors, she could have done something more spectacular. Explosions always made a cake special.
When she was done, she heated water for a cup of vanilla instant coffee, scooping the powder out of the square tin and dumping it in a mug with a rear view of several cowboys sitting on a fence: Nothin’ like starting the morning with buns and coffee.
She’d taken her first sip when she heard a sound behind her. She turned to find Gerard Darkwell looking at her cake with disapproval. Because she knew the piping, color balance, and lettering were perfect, it wasn’t the cake that had piqued his ire.
“Not cozy with Braden, huh?” he said, his voice like a growl.
“It’s a birthday cake. There are no hearts, just, ‘Happy Birthday, Nicholas!’ I thought we’d get everyone together tomorrow and celebrate.”
He inspected the cake. “So, you’d make a cake for the other two on their birthdays as well?”
“Of course.” Though she didn’t know either of them as well as Nicholas, and that wasn’t saying much. But she sensed he was a good person, and anyone who spent hours in grueling searches to find the remains of missing people…that told her enough about him.
“It’s a well-crafted cake,” he said, inspecting it. “You spent a lot of time on it.”
It was a compliment, and yet, she recognized the slippery quality of his voice. “Thank you.”
He picked up the cake stand and dumped it over, crushing the pyramid. Crumbs scattered on the white countertop.
She couldn’t breathe. “What…why…?”
“This cake tells me you’re way too invested in Braden. It will tell him the same. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He’ll think it’s sweet. Then he’ll take you to bed. It’s my job to keep you from making that mistake. I’ve guided you, protected you, raised you on my own, and brought you into the most exciting career of your life. I’m not going to let you violate my rules and get involved with a man who brings nothing to the Darkwell legacy. Remember the last time you thought you were in love.”
He’d said those last words with a sneer, but they pierced her chest. She pushed them away and stared at the ruined cake.
She was eleven years old again, when she’d painstakingly made a house out of cookies and icing when she was supposed to be reading a boring biography about George Washington. Her father had tossed her house into the garbage, set the book in front of her, and left. He never yelled. His message always got through without volume.
Words clawed up her throat: Exciting career? Being your secretary? I wanted to go overseas, see the world, but you kept me here, safe and sound. I don’t want to be your little girl forever. I never wanted a career in the CIA in the first place, but you denigrated what brought me passion and joy.
“You’ll look back on this and see I was right.” He turned before she could utter any of her words.
You’d never say them anyway. She’d been taught to respect her elders, especially her father. Still, she swallowed those bitter words and hated herself for doing so.
Good girls get love. Her father only showed affection when she obeyed. It was earned, the same way her self-worth was. When she didn’t go along cheerfully with what he wanted, the punishment was worse than his anger—she was dismissed.
Hiding that she was his daughter was yet another one of those things she’d had to agree to. He didn’t want her to be treated any differently, good or bad, because of her name, so she was known as Olivia Damarest, her middle name. She had another name, too. She smiled, feeling smug at the one secret she’d been able to keep from him.
She turned to face the mess of a cake, feeling as torn as she had that day when she was eleven. The worst part? He was right. She had invested a lot into this cake. The joy she’d felt in making it, well, only part of that was because of the artistic process. Most of it was imagining the delight on Nicholas’s face when she walked in singing “Happy Birthday.” Because she cared. Because she cared a little too much.
CHAPTER 3
Heat and pain tore down Nicholas’s throat as he tried to breathe. Roaring flames surrounded him, licking at his skin like a dragon tasting his dinner. He couldn’t see beyond those flames and the thick, dark smoke that trapped him in his bed. His eyes burned. His skin blistered. Where’s the door? I can’t remember. It didn’t matter. He would have to run through a wall of fire to get to it, and he knew more flames waited on the other side. Was there a window in the room? His brain was frying. He couldn’t remember.
Then a sound. His cell phone. He gasped one last breath as he reached for it on the nightstand. It wasn’t warm. But…how? He blinked, confused, looking at the display. His mother’s number. Sweat dripped into his eyes, burning them. Then he looked around and saw…
The room at the estate. No flames. No smoke. Only a nightmare. The nightmare.
He pressed the TALK button, and grunted, “Good morning.”
His mother, Lilah, began her annual rendition of “Happy Birthday.” He tried to stop her, but she forged on. The woman couldn’t sing worth a damn, but she sure loved trying.
He waited until she finished, mopping his face with a towel from the bathroom. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Big twenty-three. What are you going to do for your birthday? Something special, I hope.”
“I don’t know. I may go to one of the parks nearby, get lost for a while.”
“Like you could ever get lost.” She sighed. “But you were my little boy lost, wandering in the woods for hours, giving me a heart attack when I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“That’s what happens when you live out in the boonies.”
Her voice became contrite. “It was your dad’s idea, buying a hundred acres in the forest and living off the land. He didn’t think about how his two kids would handle being home-schooled and not being around other children. After we lost him, it was my fault. I couldn’t sell our dream house.”
That was how she always put it, “lost your dad.” She couldn’t say the word died. He was two when his dad was killed. He’d heard her say that phrase so many times, he thought his dad was lost. And Nicholas was going to find him. He knew his dad had explored the forest surrounding their home, so that was where he looked for him. Of course, he never found him, but he did find evidence of him. On a tree, their names carved into the trunk. A shrine of rocks, each marked to represent a member of their family. Nicholas kept looking for traces of his father. He found them by doing the things he had loved: climbing trees, camping out, cave diving.
“Nicky, I’m sorry I made you two live out there for so long. Too long. Is that why you’ve never felt close to me? Or anyone? You told me once that you’d rather be in the middle of a forest tracking down bones, or 150 feet down in the ocean looking for shipwrecks than to be around other people.”
“I think it’s just
the way I am, Mom.”
He wasn’t going to tell her that maybe it was because she kept telling him and Jennessy, his sister, not to love too deeply, because when you lost, and you would, it would hurt so much more. He and Jennessy had become self-sufficient children, used to spending lots of time alone, and he wasn’t sure either could change that.
Jennessy. She was an Offspring, too.
“Did you have the fire nightmare?”
“I haven’t had one of those in years.” This was the only kind of lie he could abide, one that kept her from being afraid. When he died, his distance would make his loss a little easier to bear.
Even before he knew what a funeral was, he’d always gone from the horror of the fire to the service. His mother and sister lost in grief, his casket. Other people crying. His sister was about the age she was now. So was his mother.
It wasn’t just a nightmare that tore through his dreams on a regular basis, and in particular, on his birthday. He knew it would come true. Just as it did for his father.
“Are you fibbing?” she asked. “Trying not to get me worried?”
“Wouldn’t I remember the nightmare if I had it?” Evasive. “Dad had them all the time, right?”
His were nightmares of being shot, of someone coming into the building he was in and shooting at everyone in the vicinity.
“About once a month. When you started getting recurring nightmares about burning…”
“But I’m not.” He remembered her reaction when he’d had the nightmare the first several times. She’d held him in stiff arms, and screamed, “Stop having those nightmares. Your daddy had them, and they came true! I couldn’t stand losing you, so stop them!”
He couldn’t stop them, but he did stop telling her about them. “How is your eye?” he asked, partly to change the subject.
“Cataract surgery is set for just over two weeks from now. Doc says it’s no big deal. I’ll wear a patch for a week, and it’ll be over. My friend Velma is going to take me to the doctor, and Jennessy is coming back for the week and take care of me.”
She was having eye surgery. He shuddered, and dark tension coiled inside him. At the funeral, his mother wore an eye patch. He was going to die in three weeks.
Lilah’s voice sounded strained, devoid of the chipper tone she’d had earlier. “Are you still afraid of fire?”
“Not much.” Another lie. It had gotten worse. Even candles, bonfires, fireplaces…they clogged his throat with the memory of choking on smoke. He couldn’t even watch the news when they were reporting fires.
“Have you heard from Jenn yet? I have no idea where she even is.”
He walked to the French doors. “Probably taking photos in Africa or slogging across the Amazon.” He rarely heard from her, though if she was near a phone, she always called him on his birthday. What should he tell her about this Offspring business? Nothing yet, but he would find out if anyone had tried contacting her. “Mom, can I ask you something about Dad?”
“Of course. Do you find yourself thinking about him on your birthday?” The wistfulness in her voice was much better than the grief that once saturated it.
“Sometimes. You said I got my skill at locating things from him. Was he always good at that?”
“For as long as I knew him. We never had lost keys or anything else when he was around.”
He leaned against the mullioned glass, watching the fog float through the channels in the maze like lost ghosts. The hedges, trimmed into neat walls, were probably fifteen feet tall. He wondered if his dad felt complete when he’d found something that was missing or if, like Nicholas, he still felt a little empty “Did he go into a trance when he was trying to find something?”
“Yeah. It was weird. I thought he was having a seizure, and his eyes went black. But it was a real gift, he had.”
Weird. He remembered the first time he discovered his “gift.” He was fourteen, down at a lake where the kids were splashing and swimming. They’d moved to town by then, but he was having a hard time relating. He’d wanted to relate to Suzie, though, in the worst way. She’d started hollering that she’d lost her ring. It had been given to her by her grandmother, who was now dead. She was devastated, inconsolable.
The next day Nicholas returned to the lake, determined to be her hero and find the ring. He felt it in his gut, that need, as though she were incomplete without it, and he could complete her by finding it. That need seemed to wake up his ability. He saw the flashes, the ring in the mud, the murky water, then his eyes snapped open and he looked right at a spot that seemed no different from any other spot. He dove in, scrabbling around in the mud before his fingers touched the smooth gold.
When he presented it to her, she hugged him, kissed him, his first kiss. He wanted to do that again for her. He wanted another kiss. Did she have anything else she wanted him to find? She mentioned a pink sweater, her favorite. He made the mistake of going into his trance in front of her. He had no idea that his eyes went black, that his body twitched as the images flashed into his head. She was horrified, accusing him of being possessed by the devil like someone in a movie she’d seen. He didn’t think she’d told anyone about it, but she’d clearly indicated to her friends that he was strange, someone to keep as only a distant friend.
After that, he’d never done it in front of someone else.
“Did Dad have any other extraordinary skills?”
“Not that I know of. Other than being smart and kind and honest, and, oh, so much more.”
“What was he doing when he died?”
“Working in a classified government project. He couldn’t tell me what it was about, and being in the Army, I understood that.”
“Was a man named Darkwell in charge?”
“Gosh, I don’t remember. Name sounds familiar.”
In the distance, a gardener was desecrating a bush by cutting it into the shape of a bear.
“Before he died, did anything change in his behavior?”
“He had trouble sleeping, forgetting things, blanking out. He said he was just stressed. He was excited about the project, though, and the money was phenomenal. I told him it wasn’t worth it if it was stressing him that much. And there was something else, but I can’t talk to you about that.”
“Tell me. I’m a big boy.”
She giggled. “He got real…amorous.”
He took a breath. “Did he mention any medicines or vitamins he was taking?”
“No, he—wait, he did say they were getting some nutritional drink. He thought that’s why he had so much, er, energy.”
Just like the Rogues had said. He wanted to tell her that was why his dad had started acting strange but didn’t want to scare her. The thought of something in his body that had changed him would freak her out. It was certainly freaking him out.
“You know, Nicky, I think Darkwell was the name of Bobby’s boss. He worked for the CIA. I thought it was pretty special that the CIA wanted him. They made arrangements to transfer him over and all. He was only twenty, in the Army for two years, when he was tapped for the program.”
He was in the program for three years. Nicholas was contracted for two months, but he could see how the money and the opportunity to help his country in an exciting way could lure a man to stay longer.
Darkwell had told him he’d met Robert Braden through a mutual friend. He’d never said anything about Robert working for him. Another lie.
“Thanks for the call, Mom.”
“When am I going to see you?”
“I’ll come by after the surgery to check on you and see Jennessy.” But maybe it was better if he didn’t see them before he died.
“That would be great. You have a wonderful day, sweetheart. I hope this is a special year.”
“Me, too.”
He hung up, his thoughts as dark as the corners of the maze. His mother had confirmed what the Rogues had told him. Whatever he’d ended up being in the middle of…he had a feeling it was going to end his life.
&
nbsp; CHAPTER 4
Olivia stood at the French doors in one of the mission rooms at the end of the hallway, watching Nicholas on his balcony. He wore only athletic shorts on a long, lean body. She’d seen him running through the grounds both early in the morning and sometimes late at night. He had a runner’s body, muscular but not bulky, and whenever she’d glimpsed him (okay, she’d out and out gawked for as long as he was in view), she’d fantasized about running her hands over those muscles.
Hm. Curious. He tied a bandana around his head to cover his eyes. Talk about erotic connotations. He walked to the stone railing and threw what looked like a small red ball. It sailed through the air and landed somewhere in the southwest quadrant of the maze. The maze was designed by a puzzle maker and was one of the most difficult in the world, something her grandfather had told everyone with pride.
But Nicholas was the most puzzling of anything she’d ever encountered (and she had gotten lost in that damned maze many times, so that was saying something). With the blindfold still on, he braced his hands on the balcony and launched himself over, dropping to the ground with the grace of a cat. He ran straight to the maze’s entrance and disappeared from view.
She felt someone walk into the room but was too entranced to turn and see who it was. Nicholas’s shock of dark hair appeared momentarily around a bend, then disappeared again. She glanced over to see who now stood beside her: Jerryl, who was also watching. His ultrashort hair and feral eyes fit his military bearing and attitude, but he seemed to have something to prove.
She turned back to the maze in time to see Nicholas emerge, racing toward the building, blindly but unerringly pulling himself up the molding and climbing back onto his balcony. He held the ball in his hand, which he dropped as he stripped off the blindfold.
“Damned show-off,” Jerryl muttered.
