by Ella James
“Come on, you guys. Let’s get back in the van. I’m not letting anything else happen to Julia,” Mer said, putting her arm around Julia’s shoulders as they all started walking.
“I’ve got a newfound appreciation for your wings, man.” That was Drew, who actually held out his hand to Cayne, who to her double surprise, actually shook it like a normal guy.
“I didn’t know anything had gone bad till Drew came around the corner with Adam on his tail,” Mer said to Julia. “I thought you’d be coming out in the front.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Julia told her.
“Do you know that little kid?” Drew asked.
“Everett,” Carlin said. “His touch brings pain. He’s like Julia’s foil. I guess they were going to use him to incapacitate her. Thierry must have spirited him over for the job.”
Julia shook her head. “He didn’t hurt me at all.”
Drew nodded. “I saw Adam’s face when he came out behind Thierry and he was shocked. When you guys split, he turned my way and I ran without thinking. I didn’t want them to see where you went, but my dumb ass led them to the van.”
“No you didn’t,” Mer said, shaking her head. “By that time, Dizzy and the others were coming out the front door right by us. They all swarmed the car and one of the thugs in the black jumpsuits busted out Car’s window.”
“Which is how I got this,” Carlin told Julia, pointing to her mouth.
“Youch.” Julia winced. “We should get you something for it.”
“Sherbet.”
“What about you guys?” Meredith asked. “How’d you get away from them?”
“First, how did you lose them?” Cayne asked.
They reached the van during Meredith’s explanation of how Dizzy had been so outraged over Mer’s running her over that she’d ended up making some tactical errors.
“Meaning I got the chance to claw her face,” Carlin said.
“And the others ended up having to keep her from going full meltdown,” Meredith finished. “Like, she’d already put every regular I could see on the ground.”
As Julia climbed back to her seat, Cayne started explaining what had happened on their end.
“I don’t understand how you’re still here,” Edan said, speaking for the first time. His typical I’m-so-clever-I-know-something-you-don’t undertone was gone, and his brow was actually furrowed. Julia was shocked to see his skin could wrinkle. “I saw Thierry. He had you by the foot.”
Julia shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“It must not have worked,” Edan said. “I don’t know many Chosen, but I’ve seen Thierry in action. If he touches you, you go.”
And, in the silence, Julia thought the same thing the others didn’t say: unless you’re The One.
She looked out the window and tried to pretend she was somewhere else. Cayne and Meredith made a plan to find a parking garage and get yet another new van.
“I can help you find somewhere safe,” he offered Meredith. “Somewhere we could get in and out.”
“Why don’t you switch seats with me in the next van,” Carlin said.
Cayne cast a glance at Julia, like he was seeking her approval. She nodded weakly, tried to smile. “I don’t need supervision, and if I did, I’m sure Carlin would do just fine.”
“I’ll keep you in line,” Carlin offered.
Almost an hour later, they were riding around dark, glitzy St. Moritz in another van of the very same kind—this one green.
“These Renaults are popular in Spain, too,” Carlin said. She lowered her voice and leaned toward Julia conspiratorially. “Many things were done in these back chairs in my school days.”
“Seriously?” Julia popped out of Sad Mode, curiosity motivating her to rejoin the land of the living.
Carlin nodded sagely. “I slapped a lot of hands—but not every hand.” She squared her shoulders and gave Julia a mischievous wink, and Julia was shocked to hear herself giggle.
“My favorite—he was named Amadis.” She broke into a radiant grin. “You should have seen the size of his hands.” Carlin wiggled her own fingers. “Oh, he was such a macho man.”
Just when Julia thought she might keel over at the hilarity of Carlin going on about her manly middle-school man, the Spanish girl’s face fell. “Did you have a lot of friends? Before,” she added softly.
Julia shook her head. As she spoke, she scanned the road behind them for suspicious cars, but a surprisingly large part of her was right there, just chilling with Carlin. “I really didn’t. I was in the foster system, remember?”
Carlin held her hand up, wobbling it like kind of.
“American orphans, the ones that aren’t adopted, get placed in group homes or in foster homes, where people take care of them but only for a little while.” It seemed a sad summation of her childhood. Sad but true. “I went to a regular school,” she said, “and the other kids there, whose parents were alive, they didn’t really want to hang out with me.”
To Julia’s surprise, Carlin’s jaw dropped. She waved at Julia’s All-Stars, then up, giving her the once-over. “But you’re so cool. Who would not want to be your friend?”
Blushing from the compliment, Julia shrugged. “Oh, you’d be surprised.”
Carlin leaned forward again, close enough for Julia to smell her citrus gum. “Let me tell you this: I am feeling more happy with Cayne.” She smiled. “He’s not so bad. So let’s say this: When we find the Chosen who have an answer for your head—” she pointed to her own— “I want you both to come to my home in Spain. We will eat fine food, and we will disco till the morning. What do you think?”
Julia nodded, smiling too, now. “That sounds really great.”
If they made it that far.
*
Sometime later, Meredith idled in another parking deck whose middle opened to the moonlit sky.
Julia leaned between Drew and Edan’s middle seats and rubbed her bleary eyes. She and Carlin had both fallen asleep—the clock said 5:45 a.m.—and now she was pretty sure she must be hearing things.
“While the rest of us slept, you guys talked about what?” she asked, glancing from Cayne to Meredith.
He clenched his teeth, so Julia could see the protruding muscle of his jaw. His why-don’t-people-just-do-what-I-say look. Julia wondered if not using his mind voodoo was killing him.
“You need to stay hidden,” he said, “while the rest of us continue looking for this…place.”
Julia opened her mouth, and Meredith said, “Don’t be mad at him. It was my idea.”
She forced a deep inhale. “So what exactly is this plan?”
“It’s the Protect Julia While the Rest of Us Keep Looking Special.”
From behind her, Julia heard: “If they catch you, you’re fucked.” Turning, she gaped; she’d never heard Carlin use casual profanity.
“Edan, what do you think?” Drew asked.
Edan shrugged. “Her headaches will come back, and I can only help her for so long. If you don’t find the Swiss Chosen soon, she’ll be forced to rejoin the others.”
“Julia is never going back,” Mer cried.
Julia’s hands flew up to her ears. “Guys, please. I’m right here. Quit talking about me like I’m not!”
“We’re not doing that,” Drew said, reaching out toward Julia like he meant to pet her; she had a fleeting memory of another time, another van. “We have to discuss these things,” he told her. “No one wants you to go back. We’re working to avoid that.”
“Okay, well how’s this for a discussion? We’re going to find them! We just need to look a little more. Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe I can sit in the car most of the time. I think I’d like that anyway. I want to keep you guys safe.”
But Cayne was shaking his head. “I have a better idea.”
*
Cayne had seen the place from the sky: a paranoid Nephilim’s heaven, Julia thought as they rolled up to the gates. He’d seen the heli-pad—it had, of all things, a to
p hat on it—but the security seemed amazing.
“Control freak city,” Drew marveled. And it really was.
In sharp contrast with the glass-and-steel high rises and sharp-edged chalets of St. Moritz, this place looked like something out of a sci-fi novel: a cluster of pale sandstone domes—three enormous ones surrounded by a dozen smaller. The polka-dot structures were situated in a valley between two massive, snow-shrouded peaks; all around them, snow lifts disappeared into the cold-fogged sky.
The pointy-topped iron gates were tall—maybe fifteen feet—and when Carlin saw the sign, she laughed. “House of the Gods, St. Moritz. Or someone with a God complex.”
“How do I get in?” Mer asked, glancing over at Cayne, who was gauging Julia’s reaction in the rear-view.
“Are we sure we want to get in?” Julia muttered. “It doesn’t look like much fun.”
“It has so many lifts,” Carlin argued. “What could be more fun than skiing?”
“Press the keypad,” Cayne suggested, “and see what happens.”
Meredith did. Julia couldn’t understand any of the conversation, carried out in Mer’s impressive German, but she could tell by Cayne’s shrewd eyes that he was following.
Meredith hesitated, and Cayne said something that sounded somewhat…violent.
Edan added something else, which sounded like an alternative to Cayne’s suggestion, and Cayne glared at him.
He said something to Meredith, which she repeated before lapsing into a tense silence.
“What’s going on?” Drew snapped, as Julia started to ask the same thing.
“They want to run a background check,” Carlin supplied; her brow furrowed. “I think I’ve heard of this place. It’s supposed to be…high class?”
“Well high-class or not, it could take up to an hour,” Meredith said.
Julia shook her head. “There’s no way they can run a background check in an hour.” Background checks were a normal part of life in the foster system—for foster parents. Even considering that the system’s check was more exhaustive, an hour was way too short.
Julia explained this, but her friends just looked at her with blank expressions. “Maybe they have a computer program,” Drew said.
“That can look us up from just our names?”
His shrugged; clearly he did not understand the tubes.
Neither did Cayne, who said, “I’d bet none of you have much of a background anyway.”
“I’ve been off the radar since I was a baby,” Drew said.
“I say we just give them our names,” Meredith said. “The worst they can do is tell us no.”
“I think this is a waste of time,” Julia said. “We need to keep moving. I don’t know how many resorts this country has, but if you guys have to keep coming back to this one, we’ll never find the right one. I can just hide in the car.”
“You’re not thinking defensively,” Cayne said, his stern voice driving Julia batty—in a bad way.
“I’m not thinking like you,” she snapped. “And I don’t have to. I’m the one who’s The One. It’s my life that’s in danger. And if I want to stay in the van I should get to stay in the damn van!”
There was a beat of silence, during which Cayne’s hard eyes bored into hers in the rear view mirror, and then softened. “It’s not just yours,” he said softly.
Julia’s stomach clenched, all her insides feeling weird and tender, like she might turn into a glob of goo; she clenched her sweaty palms, rendered temporarily mute.
Drew shifted uncomfortably in his seat, while Edan banged some rhythm on his knees and stared out the fogged window.
Finally, Meredith decided. “Let’s just try it. If it doesn’t work, we move along.”
“Try it,” Carlin nodded, but Julia wasn’t even thinking about that anymore.
Cayne’s face had lost that desperate look and gone back to something closer to his usual composure, but she could still feel something raw emanating from him.
She was suddenly irritated that the others were with them—Edan, Carlin, Drew, even Meredith. She wanted to be alone with Cayne, lie beside him on a bed, behind closed doors, to touch his face and talk. Find out when he’d gotten quite so worried.
Meredith clapped, interrupting Julia’s thoughts. “They said if we’re under 21, no background check, but if we don’t have driver’s licenses, we need to submit our names and home addresses.”
The next few minutes were spent passing around a ragged little notebook they’d found inside the glove box, while each one of them jotted down their info, plus the few local addresses Julia knew by heart from Memphis. Drew recorded Dirk and Dwight’s addy and passed the notebook to Cayne, and Julia, leaning up between the two front seats, watched as he wrote in beautiful, tidy print. Her eyes were expecting a “C,” so when she saw a “S,” she balked. Somairhle Mochridhe.
“Um…huh?”
Cayne passed the notebook to her, and she stared at the two words for a few more seconds. “This is your name?”
He nodded, and Julia had to bite her tongue. Her first thought—one of irritation: just another thing she hadn’t known. Her second: This was personal to him. So personal. She couldn’t bring it up in front of everybody else. Julia jotted her full name, but not her real address—she used the community center four blocks away.
When Meredith glanced over the notepad, she said, “Seriously Edan?”
He smirked, then shrugged.
“Cayne? How the heck do you pronounce this, and why doesn’t it say ‘Cayne’?”
He pronounced the name beautifully, the sound of it giving Julia a pleasant little shiver, and Meredith repeated it into the microphone.
After she said everyone’s whole name and a little more negotiating was done, they endured yet another long silence before the intercom beeped again. To Julia’s astonishment, they were welcomed inside the polka-dot kingdom.
CHAPTER FIVE
It took a lot to make running from kidnappers seem like the exotic vacation she’d never had, but House of the Gods, St. Moritz was…well, a lot. As Mer drove them through the huge gate, their path slanted slightly down; when it leveled out, the dome-like buildings fit a little more naturally into the icy, early morning landscape—surrounded by fir-looking trees and great, fluffy, holly-looking bushes. The building’s exterior, which had originally looked like rough sandstone, was actually closer to marble; the stone glittered through the tufts of fir needles and gleamed wetly under melting snowflakes as they passed a few small buildings.
The landscape, which at first seemed so organic, began to reveal its pattern: loosely plotted groves of short, bushy trees, gently waving seas of prickly bushes—and all of it topped by a thick layer of snow.
Carlin was the first to shriek. She covered her mouth, bounced up and down in her seat, and shrieked again, this time through her long, thin fingers.
“Omigod, omigod, it’s Jess Stanton! And…oh baby.”
Now that Julia had heard Carlin gush over Mr. Manly Hands, she wasn’t quite as shocked to hear her going movie-star crazy. She followed the line of Carlin’s arm as it stretched toward the back window, pointing at a cluster of bushy trees where a pretty blonde who looked very, very much like Jessica Stanton stood by a bench, wearing a baby blue snow suit, furry boots, and a chic gray beanie, and talking into an iPhone.
The woman was super fit and super-hot, and Julia decided yes, it probably was Jessica Stanton. Then she forgot about the celebrity altogether, because she noticed Jess was flanked by three beefy bodyguards, and Julia’s jaw literally dropped.
HOLY HOLY CRAP, HOLY FREAKING HOTNESS, BATMAN.
The bodyguards…
They were…
“Oh my God. Oh. Wow.”
Her eyes did a quadruple take, fighting to stay on the bodyguards as Meredith wove the van between trees. At some point in the space-time continuum, Mer stopped driving, making high-pitched oohing and aahing sounds of her own.
Julia had managed to stop the sounds com
ing from her own throat and was trying to talk her mind and body out of their revolt. Yes, Jess’s guards were very, very good-looking. They were tall, with the kind of shoulders you didn’t usually find outside an NFL defensive line and the kind of faces you didn’t find outside of fantasies. It was true their backsides were tight enough to bounce a quarter off of and clad in just-the-right-amount-of-tight gray ski pants. And the one standing sideways had a package that…
Oh dear God, did she just critique his…
“No. No, no.”
Julia shook her head, stealing a guilty glance at Cayne, who was looking at her with his brows clenched and his mouth twisted. She told herself to stop, but they had such slim, grab-able hips. And their hair…
It was all of the Edan variety. Luscious. Mmm, just beckoning your fingers.
Body Guard #1 wore his pale blond locks down to his shoulders; unlike most man hair, this guy’s tresses actually seemed brushed. The second one sported jet black spikes that shone like raven’s wings; they were neither stiff nor sharp, and rather than looking silly and overdone, they simply served to emphasize his breathtaking face; the third had a wildly curly strawberry-blond mane that hung into his eyes—deep gold-brown and bright against his mocha skin.
She knew she shouldn’t be looking at other guys, but the three of them together…well, they were something else.
The thought echoed in Julia’s head, and then—in an instant—the moment was over. Her body throbbed like she’d just run a mile or two, and her sweaty skin felt flushed, but she felt enough like herself again to be mortified that she’d done a (literal!) drive-and-drool in front of Cayne, who still had his eyes narrowed at the guards.
Julia rubbed her temples and looked around at the rest of her friends. Drew chewed his lip and looked down at his feet, which were tapping an awkward rhythm on the floorboard. Both Carlin and Meredith seemed to be recovering from their own droolfests. Julia glanced at Edan, expecting some smart remark, and was shocked to see him looking…livid.
“Edan…what’s the matter?”
Cayne was looking at him, too, openly curious; none of them had ever seen easy-going Edan mad.
