by Reinke, Sara
“The door was unlocked. I let myself in.” Naima first uncrossed her legs, then swung them around, rising gracefully from the sofa. “You should lock it from now on. For a little while, anyway.”
Puzzled, Karen frowned. “Why?”
The Morin family compound was well hidden and fully secured, accessible through security-gated entrances. It was out of the way, even for tourists who flocked in droves to see the beaches of Emerald Bay below them, or the neighboring historic Vikingsholm mansion. Even though most of the Morin houses were vacant the majority of the year, as a rule, they remained unlocked because no one in the family mistrusted another enough to guard their belongings so closely or carefully. Karen had always liked this relaxed, carefree sort of lifestyle; it had reminded her of her childhood, the simple securities she and her family had enjoyed in her Kansas hometown.
“I don’t want to upset you,” Naima began as she walked toward Karen.
Trust me, Karen thought about saying. Nothing can upset me more than your brother has today.
“Last night, Michel and I ran into someone out in the woods,” Naima said. “His name was Jean Luc Davenant. He’s like us, one of the Brethren.”
“Davenant?” Karen frowned thoughtfully for a moment, struggling to place the familiar-sounding name. “You mean, one of the family who tried to kill Augustus and Brandon back in Kentucky? Brandon’s sister, Tessa, is married to one of them, isn’t she?”
“Was married,” Naima corrected, because Martin Davenant, Tessa’s abusive husband, was dead. Augustus Noble had killed him. “Jean Luc is his uncle.”
“What was he doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Naima shook her head. “But Michel told me he’d sensed him in the forest, snooping around. It makes sense that one or more of them might have tracked Augustus and Brandon back here, back to us, when they left Kentucky.”
Karen remembered another reason the name Davenant was known to her. “They’re the ones who tried to murder your family, aren’t they?” she asked, and Naima nodded.
“In 1815, they burned our great house to the ground, yes. Their objective was to kill everyone inside.”
But you’d already escaped, Karen thought. Augustus Noble found out what the Davenants had planned, and he warned Michel, helped the family to escape. The Davenants didn’t know, didn’t realize it, not at first, anyway.
“Probably not until last night,” Naima agreed, because unlike most other Brethren, she kept her mind wide open nearly all the time, making her privy to the thoughts of just about anyone within her immediate vicinity.
“Jean Luc Davenant attacked us,” she continued. “He doesn’t possess the telekinesis of one who has fed from another Brethren, but he’s still physically very powerful. We fended him off, drove him away, but Michel thinks he’ll be back. And that he won’t be alone this time.”
“What will they do?” Karen asked. “The Davenants, I mean. When they find out the Morins are still alive?”
Allistair Davenant was the worst among them, right? she thought. He was their Elder, the one who hated Augustus.
“I imagine they’ll try to kill us again,” Naima replied grimly. “They hated Michel too, just as much as—if not more than—Augustus. And Allistair was far from the worst. There were seven Davenant brothers, each just as dangerous—and as deadly—as the last.”
She walked toward the front door to let herself out, her posture pristine, her stride languid like that of royalty. “You should keep your doors locked,” she said again.
“Thanks.” Karen nodded, cutting her eyes uneasily to the nearest window. “I’ll do that.”
CHAPTER THREE
Tristan didn’t normally like to use his telepathy to deliberately manipulate humans, but there were some instances in which he found it to be a necessary evil.
“I really appreciate your help,” he told the pharmacy assistant with a smile.
“It’s no problem at all, Mr. Noble,” she replied, color rising in her cheeks as she handed him a white paper sack. “Two thirty-day bottles of bupropion.”
As a physician, he couldn’t write prescriptions for himself, but he could pretend to be Brandon. When he’d handed the assistant his driver’s license, he’d used his power to trick her into seeing Brandon’s name on the laminated card, not his own. The illusion had been so perfect, her persuasion so complete, she hadn’t looked twice or doubted his identity once.
On the way back to the clinic, he thought about stopping by Karen’s house, to try to explain things, make amends by her somehow. The trip into town hadn’t taken more than an hour, round trip, including a swing through Starbucks on the way back for a Venti bold with a double shot, no room. The coffee was hotter than hell, and he sipped at it warily along the drive. As he tried for a drink while maneuvering along the winding, rutted gravel road leading up to the Morin compound, he hit a particularly deep pothole that rocked the Jeep on its suspension, sending a hot splatter of coffee down the front of his face and coat, splashing onto the leg of his jeans.
“Shit!” Driving with one hand, letting the Jeep weave precariously close to the shoulder of the road, he shoved the paper cup into the nearest console tray, then raised his hips, trying to pull the soaked denim off his skin before it scalded too badly.
In doing so, he cut his eyes off the road momentarily, no more than a few seconds. When he glanced back up through the windshield again, he saw a car pulling out of one of the side drives ahead of him, merging unexpectedly onto the compound’s main road.
“Holy shit!” He slammed on his brakes. The wheels of the Jeep abruptly locked, sending the heavy truck skidding sideways in the gravel. It bounced heavily over the shoulder, sending more coffee splattering, and crashed grille-first into the broad trunk of a venerable pine tree. The airbag deployed, slamming into his torso as it abruptly inflated, stunning the breath and wits from him.
With a groan, he blinked dazedly, watching pinpoints of light sparkle and dance in front of him against a backdrop of heavy white nylon. Already, the airbag was deflating, growing lax in front of him, and he reached for his seat belt.
“Shit.” He was shaking uncontrollably, adrenaline surging through him. As he glanced through the side mirror, he could see the car he’d damn near hit and bit back another groan.
“Shit,” he muttered again, because his grandfather was getting out of the black Mercedes sedan, slamming the door furiously and then stomping toward Tristan’s Jeep.
“Hey, Michel.” Bracing himself for what he felt sure would be an ass chewing, he opened the driver’s side door and stumbled out. His neck and back felt stiff and sore, and he wondered if he’d suffered whiplash at the impact.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Michel demanded, his brows knitted deeply, his hands balled into fists. “You could have killed us both!”
“I’m sorry. I just looked away for a second. I was trying to—”
“Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling.”
“What?” Tristan shook his head, still somewhat dazed from smacking face-first into the airbag.
“Why isn’t your cell phone on?” Michel snapped.
“It is…” Tristan began, reaching for the clip on the waist of his jeans where he customarily holstered his phone. To his surprise, it was empty. He racked his brain back through the morning’s events, then realized… “I left it at home.”
“You’re supposed to be at the clinic.”
“I was there. I had to run an errand in town. I’m just on my way back now.” It occurred to Tristan that even though Michel was wound up about something, it had nothing to do with their narrowly averted headlong collision. His grandfather’s eyes were round, his pupils enlarged, his scent tinged with the heavy aroma of adrenaline and anxious sweat. “What’s going on?”
“I thought something was wrong,” Michel said. “I thought something had happened to you.”
Tristan managed a laugh, convinced that he’d struck his head harder than he’d fi
rst suspected and that he was having some kind of auditory hallucination. What the hell could’ve happened? he wondered. An overdose of boredom?
At this, the cleft between Michel’s brows deepened. “You’re supposed to be at the clinic,” he seethed again. “Eleanor could have fallen or cut herself. What if she’d started to hemorrhage? I would have needed you to bring me the clotting treatment.”
Eleanor Noble, Brandon’s grandmother, had been diagnosed three years earlier with what Michel called autoimmune-specific disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. It was a congenital disease unique among full-blooded Brethren. Michel had long hypothesized that the disease was the result of centuries of inbreeding among various Brethren clans, a practice dating as far back as the fourteenth century, when their ancestors had lived in medieval France. Though the Brethren Elders had tried to take great care to prevent direct blood relations from intermarrying, there had been no way to prevent it completely in such a closed breeding environment. It was extremely rare, affecting about one in every thousand Brethren adults.
Sufferers of the disease eventually came to exhaust their platelet supply, the chief component that allowed for blood clotting and coagulation. Normally a healthy individual’s platelets were replenished regularly by the bone marrow, but in Eleanor, this process had become irregular, sporadic, and ineffective. Without regular infusions of new platelets and a synthesized clotting factor that Michel’s medical research company, Pharmaceaux International, had developed, Eleanor would eventually bleed at the slightest injury or touch.
“Do you understand how serious that would have been?” Michel demanded of him, his face flushed angrily.
Of course I understand. Tristan bit back the sharp reply, furrowing his brows. I watched my mother die from the same goddamn thing.
“She could bleed to death,” Michel supplied—even though, as the one who’d presided over Lisette’s funeral service the day before, he was perfectly aware of Tristan’s all too personal familiarity with the disease.
“I’m sorry.” Angry, embarrassed, and most of all, ashamed—because he liked Eleanor and would have been beside himself with grief and guilt if anything had happened to her—Tristan looked away. “I wasn’t gone long, Michel. I swear. I just—”
“You were supposed to be at the clinic.” Michel fairly spat the words this time, jabbing his forefinger in the air at Tristan’s nose with forceful emphasis. “No place else.”
“There was nothing going on,” Tristan argued, bristling. “I thought it would be all right. I’m sorry, I said. It won’t happen again.”
For a long moment, Michel stood there, looking for all the world like he was toying with the idea of punching Tristan. Then he turned, stomping toward the Jeep. “You’re goddamn right it won’t.”
As Tristan watched, Michel opened the driver’s door, leaned inside, and snatched his keys from the ignition.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Are you kidding? You’re taking away my keys?”
He started to laugh and Michel shot him a withering glare. “These aren’t yours,” he said, holding up the keys, letting them dangle in the air between them. “They’re mine. I bought and paid for them.”
At that, something in Tristan snapped. His day had been nothing but a topsy-turvy, bewildering maelstrom of miserable, conflicting emotions, and all at once, he’d had enough. “Yeah. I know. You never let me forget it, do you? Just like you never let Mom—or anyone else—forget we were both only here by your say-so, your goddamn okay.”
Michel had been walking back toward his car, but his footsteps came to a crunching halt now in the loose gravel. His eyes narrowed into furious slits as he glanced over his shoulder. “Quoi?” he asked quietly, almost incredulously, reverting in his rage to his native French. “What did you say to me?”
“You heard me.” Squaring off against his grandfather, Tristan bared his fists. “Tell me something, Michel. How long did it take for you to decide which one got your precious clotting treatment—Eleanor or my mom?”
Only Eleanor had received the regimens of clotting factor. Although she and Lisette had been diagnosed within weeks of each other, Eleanor’s had come as the result of her husband—Michel’s best friend—Augustus contacting Michel by mail for help. Lisette had already been at Lake Tahoe, already in the Brethren medical clinic by the time Augustus and Michel had been able to smuggle Eleanor out of Kentucky. By the time Eleanor had arrived among the Morins, Lisette had already suffered the massive cranial hemorrhage that had incapacitated her.
“I would have helped your mother if I’d been able,” Michel told him.
Tristan managed a laugh. “Bullshit. The clotting serum might have stopped the bleeding in her brain in time.”
“Tristan,” Michel said, his furious expression faltering. “There was nothing I could do. Even if we’d been able to somehow stop the bleeding, she still wouldn’t have—”
“You don’t know that,” Tristan snapped. “You didn’t even try. You probably thought she had it coming. Hell, I know most of the rest of the clan did.”
Michel’s mouth drew down angrily again. “That isn’t—”
“What?” Tristan cut in. “True? Of course it is. Why don’t you just admit it for once? You thought she was a whore.”
Michel’s hand flew so quickly, Tristan didn’t even see the blow coming. His grandfather slapped him hard enough to snap his head to the side, leaving a bright, aching spot high on the crest of his cheekbone.
“Don’t you ever say that about your mother again,” Michel said in a low, angry voice. “And don’t you dare presume to tell me what I do or do not think.”
Tristan’s birth father, Arnaud Morin, had been Michel’s son. Lisette had been married to Arnaud’s brother, Phillip, but the two had enjoyed a short-lived but apparently passionate fling together. Arnaud had committed suicide, leaving Lisette to deal with the fallout once the affair had been discovered.
“The only reason you didn’t kick Mom out of the compound was because you found out she was pregnant with me—Arnaud’s bastard son,” he snapped at Michel.
“Those are your words, not mine. I’ve never thought of you like that,” Michel said. “None of us have.”
“Yeah, I could see how much the whole family gave a shit by how many showed up for her funeral yesterday. Counting you, me, and Mason, that made, what? A dozen? No, wait, three of them were Nobles, and two—Karen and Lina—were human.” Idiotically, he felt on the verge of tears again. Part of the stress he’d felt yesterday that had forced him into bed with Karen were the shame and dismay that came with the realization of just how empty his mother’s graveside had been. Staring at Michel, he pleaded, “Is that why you didn’t want me to marry Tessa Noble?”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Tessa. You weren’t in love with her, anyway. And she’s in love with your brother.”
“Rene’s my half brother. And he’s half human. He and Naima both. Does that make them better than me somehow to you? They’re bastards too, but hey, at least they’re half-breeds and didn’t spoil your otherwise spotless bloodline.”
Michel blinked at him, then shook his head. “Is that what you think?”
“Am I wrong?” Tristan shot back.
“I’ve never treated you differently than anyone else in this family.”
“Bullshit! I don’t see any of the other grandchildren trapped here like I am. Hell, you let everyone else in the clan come and go as they damn well please.”
“Trapped?” Michel bristled visibly at this. “Mon Dieu, you are the most ungrateful, self-centered, spoiled—”
Tristan laughed. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’ve given you an education, a vocation, a home, a career—anything you could ever want,” Michel shouted.
“You don’t know what I want,” Tristan yelled back. “You son of a bitch, you’ve never even bothered to ask!” Without waiting for Michel to react or respond, he turned around and began to walk away.
&nbs
p; “Keep your keys and your goddamn Jeep,” Tristan said without turning around. “If you’d given half the shit about my mother—and me—that you do about Eleanor, she might still be alive today.”
****
After Naima left, Karen moved methodically throughout her house, making sure all the doors and windows were locked. The idea that Jean Luc Davenant might still be out in the surrounding woods troubled her.
“Don’t be afraid,” Naima had said, trying to smile in reassuring fashion as she’d walked down the front steps. “We’ll find him.”
Don’t be afraid. Yeah, right. Karen sat at the breakfast bar in her bathrobe, her hair still damp, cradling a cup of coffee between her hands. Like Tristan’s, her house had an open first-story floor plan, with the far wall made of floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors. She’d always loved the view these provided, but now felt exposed and vulnerable.
A hint of movement among the trees along the periphery of the yard caught her attention. She cut her gaze to track it and spied a shadow-draped figure, oblong and indistinct, behind a cluster of pine trunks. Her breath drew to a halt, her eyes flew wide, her entire body growing rigid in her chair.
Michel thinks he’ll be back. And that he won’t be alone this time.
Naima’s warning echoing in her mind, Karen slowly lowered her mug to the countertop. Inching her hips sideways, she eased herself toward the edge of the seat, letting her feet drop slowly, deliberately to the floor. She kept her eyes glued to that strange shape in the trees as she made her way from the kitchen to a nearby linen closet. It’s just a trick of the light, she kept trying to tell herself. There’s no one out there. Naima was just here. She would’ve sensed it if Davenant was close by.
But Naima had speculated that the reason Jean Luc had been able to infiltrate so deeply into the Morin compound undetected the night before was that he was a Brethren. They were used to sensing each other in the area, to the point where they pretty much tuned out the awareness. Unless they probed more deeply, looking for something Naima called “unfamiliar mental imprints” with their telepathy, they might not realize immediately if there was a stranger among them.
