How she knew what he’d been going through, he couldn’t say. Nodding, he gave her one more sidearm hug and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “They say it’s a coma. She could wake up anytime. Or never.” His voice cracked, but he swallowed the doubt away again and shoved his hands into his pockets.
Ellie rubbed her arm and winced. Michael took another look at her. “Are you okay?”
She sighed. “No.” She glanced at Airel’s mom and lowered her voice. “Can we talk?” She ticked her head toward the hall.
Michael followed her out.
Ellie rolled up her shirtsleeve. Black webs twisted up and down her arm. Michael knew what it was, but he caught his breath anyway. He’d been fighting the same thing. “When did it start?”
Ellie kept her eyes locked on her arm and shrugged. “A few days ago. It’s spreading.”
Michael cursed and clenched his fists so hard that his knuckles turned white. “It’s my fault. You shouldn’t have taken it from me.”
Ellie rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Michael, it was the only choice left and you know it.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t work. Look at you, Ellie.”
“Hey, do I seem worried to you?”
“Does Kreios know?”
She exhaled. “He helped me once before.”
“Something’s different this time, Ellie.” Michael didn’t want to say it out loud. It possessed its own intelligence—it seemed to be alive, to think, to reason. It was stronger, more invasive. “I’m not sure I can do this anymore.”
He felt her hand grasp his arm. “Don’t you say things like that, mate. I’ll not have you giving up.”
He breathed; it was jagged. “I don’t have the Mark on my body, Ellie. It’s in my mind. It’s there—I can feel it. The Bloodstone is calling me.” Their eyes met, and the full weight of this truth passed between them. “I’m the rightful heir in the Alexander line. If I don’t obey, it will try to kill me.”
Ellie rolled her sleeve down and seemed to be considering what he said. “This isn’t in any of the old Books. I’m at a loss, mate. All I know is that something’s moving, a war’s coming . . . and you’re at the center of it. My dreams are never wrong. I still believe you can choose; you have free will, Michael.”
“Choosing between two different kinds of sure death doesn’t feel like much of a choice.”
Ellie shrugged. She pointed back into Airel’s room. “What about her? Was she ready? Did she have enough choices? Enough time to make them?”
“I’ve messed things up with her.” He fought back tears. “I hear it calling to me; I can’t stop the voices in my head. I feel like I’m going crazy.”
Ellie took him by the shoulders—she was strong. Mist rolled off her, a dark fog. “You have to destroy it, Michael. Destroy the Bloodstone. It will never stop—surely you know this. The only one who can destroy it is the rightful Seer—you. I can’t tell you how to do it, but I know the Brotherhood inside and out, and so do you.” She pointed toward Airel’s hollow body, kept alive by machines. “You do whatever it takes, do whatever you must—become the Seer, for all I care. But once you do, take that cursed thing and destroy it.”
Tears. “I can’t.”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“It will consume me. It will take over—it will control my every thought, my every action.”
“If that’s the price, you must pay it. You’re the only one who can, Michael. Like you said, you don’t have much of a choice.”
CHAPTER II
Boise, Idaho, Present Day
JOHN CROSS WAS TIRED. His daughter was in a coma, on life support, unable to breathe on her own, and his wife was wilting away. She couldn’t be budged from Airel’s bedside. It had only been a week and she was already down ten pounds. Ten pounds she couldn’t afford to lose.
Tonight he wanted nothing more than to sit in his living room and watch the late-night newscast. But two minutes into it, the power went out. He cursed under his breath. Every light and appliance in the house was dead. It didn’t take much investigation past a quick glance at the clock on the stove and the display on the thermostat. All dead.
He peeked out the back windows toward his neighbors. Their houses were dark too. He looked over his shoulder through the living room toward the front of the house. The streetlights weren’t even on. “Big power outage.”
He walked outside onto the front porch to survey the neighborhood. It was lifeless, quiet. That eerie quality was broken by the opening and shutting of a door about a block away, a conversation spilling out from the private parts of another house in the opposite direction. People were being driven outside by the cutoff.
John chuckled. Figures. The only time we ever engage our neighbors anymore is when something’s gone wrong.
He heard the sound of breaking glass. He wheeled around. It had come from behind him, inside the house. His instincts to defend kicked in.
He hurried inside, hugging the wall, staying low, using to his advantage the training and experience he had acquired in his time as a weapon’s smuggler. As he surveyed his house, clearing it step by step, room by room, his mind was on one thing—his study. Behind the bookcase was his gun safe, his weapon’s cache.
He cleared the living room, the kitchen and dining room, but they were basically one space, and he cleared them at a glance. There was no evidence of ingress here—no broken glass. He, or they, have to be somewhere else. Maybe down the hall. Toward the study. John cursed, his back to the corner of the wall that adjoined the hallway that led to his office. He got low and peeked around the corner.
Nothing.
He crept toward his study, but the door to the little half bath came first. He had to clear that room before moving past it. With the overwhelming feeling that it might be his last act on earth, and as quietly as possible, he pushed the partially open door wide, flicking on the light switch.
Nothing happened.
I forgot—the power’s out.
For a moment, John’s heart stopped, the hand of terror wrapping fully around it as he fumbled in the darkness. But his eyes adjusted and he perceived that the little room was empty. He breathed in hard and his heart pounded in his ears.
He turned toward his study, giving a slight shiver, so close to the security granted by the explosive power of his weapons. The study was empty—no intruder. He was beginning to wonder if this was all in his mind, if there had been anyone at all.
John swung the bookcase open and began working the combination to the safe. There was a 12-gauge Mossberg in there with six shells of birdshot in the magazine. That’ll talk to ‘em. He grabbed some rifled slugs and jammed them into his pockets.
He didn’t have much time to think. He only had enough time to rack the slide on the Mossberg, jacking a shell into the chamber. Before he could take it off safety, before he could turn around, he was dropped to his knees by a blow to his leg that crackled through him in a blaze of pain. He cried out. It took all he had to keep the shotgun under control as he fell.
“How does it feel, Cross?” came the shrill voice of his attacker.
John tried to breathe through the pain that was even now ebbing away. “Ow. Not good,” he groaned, “if you really must know.” His right thigh was on fire. John suspected it had been a baseball bat swung at his leg. As he turned to face his attacker, his suspicions were confirmed.
“Don’t get cute,” the assailant said, letting the wooden bat fall to the carpeted floor, standing over him with a pistol aimed point-blank at his head. “Drop it.”
John looked at him. “What, this old thing?” he asked, cocking his head at the shotgun in his hands. John had managed to get himself turned around into a sitting position with the barrel of the shotgun pointing vaguely upward at the ceiling and slightly forward to where the intruder, who he could now see was wearing a mask, stood over him. John’s right hand was still in place by the trigger, though his left had been used to support his weight as he
turned around to face his enemy.
“Would you like to die?” the man asked. “Drop your gun.”
The implication of the question was that he had something for which he wanted to live. John’s brow furrowed as his right thumb worked against the safety release on the shotgun. But he wasn’t sure anymore. His life was nothing but pain and questions. “Are you trying to piss me off?”
The shrill voice of the thug rose in pitch and volume. “I said, do you want to die?” He cocked the hammer on the revolver and John watched the cylinder rotate into position, readying the shot from the bullet that might take his life.
John’s shotgun finally snicked quietly into fire mode, and as it did, his grip changed. His forefinger and middle finger gripped the weapon in front of the trigger guard and his ring finger slipped smoothly over the trigger, his thumb wrapping around the receiver. The butt stock was wedged firmly against the carpet at the baseboard. He applied more pressure with his ring finger. “Are you working for MAGICIAN, or are you just some poor slob who’s trying to rob the wrong house?”
“Shut up! Drop your weapon and tell me where it is!”
“If you were going to kill me, I’d be dead already. As for what you want, I don’t have it. Or didn’t you get the memo?” Trigger pressure increased slowly and steadily. “Amateur.” The trigger clicked against the release pawl, and the shotgun’s firing pin slammed home against the primer at the base of the shell in the chamber. But there was only an audible click.
Dud, John thought, along with a few other choice words.
As the consequences of this unforeseen event ran wild in his mind, he saw raw surprise scatter across the thug’s eyes like scared children running from a terrifying dog. Yeah, he didn’t expect I’d fire. Now he’s just cheated death and he’s not sure what to do about it. Maybe they didn’t come to kill me.
The thug had been standing close—too close—with his right foot placed between both of John’s, the muzzle of the pistol extended to within a foot of John’s forehead. He thinks he can’t miss from this distance.
John twisted sharply to his left, ducking down and away from the revolver, sweeping his left foot across the carpet toward the thug’s right foot. As he did this, he kicked upward toward the knee with his right. When the blow landed, he could hear a low, snapping thud as the attacker’s knee dislocated.
The man went down with a startled cry, but he held fast to the pistol. As he grasped it, he squeezed the trigger and dropped the hammer. The revolver spat harshly, roaring into the wall just above John’s head.
The Mossberg was still in John’s right hand, its barrel now lying across his injured thigh, angling lower than before, but still pointing over the head of the attacker.
It was coming down to this—the strong would survive. That was true for John Cross in every aspect of life right now.
The thug was moaning before him on the floor, not an arm’s length away, curled up and clutching at his knee. John reached out with his left hand and grasped the shotgun by the forend, freeing his right hand for other work. He punched the man in the throat, softening him completely now. He was a puddle of goo and choking tears.
John relieved the man of the revolver, tossed it aside, and got to his feet. He stood over him and aimed the muzzle of the shotgun at his head, point-blank. “Are you leaving now, or were you hoping for a wild second chance?” He began to reach down to unmask the villain when the shotgun finally went off.
It wasn’t a dud—it was a hangfire.
There was nothing left of the man’s mask now, or his head. This was disturbing, to be sure, and not least because of the mess it had produced in John’s study. But none of that disturbed him as much as did the thought that this seemingly amateur thug had known his name. How does it feel, Cross? The words echoed in John’s mind.
He scratched his temple with the muzzle of the shotgun. It was warm. I need to clear the rest of the house. There might be another. He racked the slide and proceeded into the hallway.
CHAPTER III
Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, Present Day
ELLIE LAY SHIVERING UNDER several blankets in the library before the fire. She was not well, not at all. She felt fatigued at all times lately. She lacked the strength to do much of anything for herself. Even getting up to use the loo was a trial. She had been camped out on the couch in the library by the never-ending fire for the past week, and she couldn’t get warm.
She pored over books searching for an answer, something to tell her what Michael could do, if there was a way to destroy the Bloodstone and who John Cross really was. She was about to give up when she came across a marriage license through an online tracking service. Airel’s birth certificate, documents from the hospital, and even vaccination records—it was all there, everything but what happened before Mr. and Mrs. Cross were married.
This aborted paper trail concerned Ellie. Everyone left a mark. She knew this because she was so good at leaving just the right amount of information in her wake. If anyone looked into her, they would see enough to satisfy their curiosity, but John Cross was invisible. It was all too clean.
One of her hobbies was hacking. Her years of experience made her elite. She remembered when the Web had first launched, how she was one of the first to realize its true potential. Now like a bloodhound on a scent, she dug into the national database for missing persons and hacked through CIA and FBI firewalls—and not just those, but the shadow companies who served them—to see if there was anyone matching John Cross’s profile who had gone missing or been found. She limited her search to the twenty-year span before John had married his wife.
There were a few thousand John Does missing within that time frame and a few hundred found. But all of these records were either hard copy or microfiche and not available online. She did learn that John Cross worked freelance for the CIA off and on. What kind of man freelances for the CI-freaking-A?
He owned a company—“Revolutionary Technologies, LLC”—and used it to move tech like weapons and guidance chips. If a “sensitive” piece of equipment needed to get from point A to point B, it seemed John Cross was your man. But like most entrepreneurs untrained and unchecked by the Company—the CIA—he was a risk. He could always cut and run. The CIA didn’t like loose ends, and John Cross was potentially a big one. So, Johnny boy. What have they got on you that’s keeping you in line? She wondered if it had an expiration date and how desperate that might make him.
Ellie could see now why he was so secretive. But that didn’t explain his empty past.
She shut her laptop and stood with great effort.
“You are not well,” Kreios said. He was standing by the fire, quietly watching her.
“You scared me.” She wore long sleeves to hide the Mark, but he could read her thoughts. So what’s the point in hiding it from him? “The Mark is back, Father. I fear it has bonded to me in ways beyond what we first imagined.”
Kreios did not betray any surprise. “When I took it from you, I saw that what I was taking bore Michael’s signature. Of all people. It was noble of you to try to save one of them.”
“Yes, well. I have much to pay for.”
“Something distinct remained, though, something old. It was too entangled within you for me to try to remove it. I might have killed you.”
Ellie thought of her past and the Bloodstone that consumed her, the one that also took her son from her. “That wasn’t the first time I’d been marked.”
“I know. That became clear over time.”
“I’m sorry, Father. So many times, I . . . I wanted to come to you. I wanted to explain everything.” She sat back down, exhausted.
“A father bears his burdens.”
“I guess some sins are never forgiven,” she said.
Kreios folded his arms across his chest. “Sins can be forgiven, but scars remain. And neither is forgotten.”
Ellie knew that if she stayed, she would die a slow death—it would be painful. She had little time left to her. She
wanted to be of further use before it was too late. “I have somewhere to be.”
“Other than in your father’s house?”
“And you have war on your mind.”
Kreios shrugged. She could see his eyes darken to full black. “The world is thin, and yes, war is coming. You should stay here, daughter. Rest.”
Now Ellie folded her arms. “I told you—I have large debts. I intend to pay them.”
“With your life?”
“I spent my life racking them up. How else can they be paid?”
“You confuse your scars with your sins. They are not the same thing. You do not have to go.”
“You know better than that, Father. I must go. Airel is slipping, Michael is fighting a battle he may very well lose, and you—you I can no longer read.” She narrowed her eyes and concentrated as hard as she could on him. “No . . . no, darkness hides your mind from me.”
He walked toward her, his eyes blazing. For the first time in her life, Ellie was scared of him. “I will not lose you again. You will stay. I am not asking.”
“Nor am I.” Ellie thought of the place she wanted to go and disappeared.
* * *
I COULD SEE MICHAEL crying, standing over my bed, looking at me as if I were already dead. I could hear him, see Mom sitting there trapped inside her own mind. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t express how I felt. My flesh was a prison.
The demon I now knew as Dirk Elliott thought I was dead. Or did he? Maybe he wants me alive, and he’s going to come back for me.
Fear tore through me. I struggled to get back to my body, but nothing worked. Dirk had damaged me badly, maybe permanently. I was so tired. I dreamed, remembered, and wept for the life I might never experience. Michael was standing right there, but I would never get to tell him I was sorry, that I loved him.
Ellie said something to him and then they left the room. My heart broke. What if he never comes back? What if I don’t?
The Airel Saga Box Set: Young Adult Paranormal Romance Page 78
