He had never seen Adam’s aura engulf anyone else before. It spoke of a bond far stronger than one based on just emotion.
After the kiss ended, he expected Adam to drive off, leaving Bobbie behind, but instead they both slipped into Adam’s Bentley. With a low rumble, the engine jumped to life, followed by the flare of the headlights.
Adam pulled out onto Ocean Avenue, and after a short wait to allow enough distance to disguise his presence, Salvatore started his car and turned onto the street, lights off to avoid immediate discovery.
Adam seemed in no rush, keeping a moderate pace past the homes and inns on Ocean Avenue. Instead of continuing down the beachfront road, he turned westward and up to Main Avenue. Traveling south, he pushed the sports car a little faster through the stretches of mile-long beach towns and past the turnoff for his home in Spring Lake.
Salvatore narrowed his eyes, perplexed by where his son… No, not his son. That ruse was over. Adam was now just the first subject in the long overdue launch of the Genesis project. He could no longer let emotion interfere in what he had to do. In what he had planned for so many years.
Vigilant as he tried to guess where Adam might be headed, Salvatore followed carefully. The Bentley pushed past modest homes, which became a tangle of small businesses before the street reached the end of the town and the lake for which it was named. Barely a quarter mile later, Adam turned eastward toward the ocean in Sea Girt.
A hodgepodge of moderately sized homes developed into multimillion-dollar beach houses and the lovingly restored Beacon House Inn. Across from the inn sat the normally busy Parker House, almost quiet with the late hour as waiters tidied up.
Salvatore pulled over as Adam’s brake lights flared to life and his son turned the Bentley into a parking spot across the street from the Sea Girt lighthouse. The beacon atop the red brick building rotated, piercing the night sky, serving as a reference point for Adam and Bobbie, apparently, since they left their car and headed straight for the lighthouse.
They moved with determined strides that put distance between them and the street quickly, puzzling him, since Bobbie appeared to have little evidence of her earlier limp. The two marched in front of the lighthouse and then disappeared from sight.
Intrigued, Salvatore exited his car and chased after them.
Bobbie and Adam paused on the walkway in front of the beacon, scoping out the beachfront in between sweeps of the rotating light. The night’s earlier storm had created a haze along the shore and another approaching front hung over the ocean, threatening. Bright shards of light mixed with muted flashes as the tempest neared.
“It may not be safe along the waterfront if the storm hits,” Bobbie said, and Adam peered at her from the corner of his eye.
“It may not be safe period.” Adam tucked his hands beneath his arms and squinted into the misty night, trying to make out any shapes along the sand. There were none.
“Maybe you should stay up here. Just in case there’s trouble.”
Bobbie wagged her head emphatically. “No way, no how. We go together or we don’t go at all.”
Facing her, he took note of the determined set to her jaw and the defiant tilt of her head. She had on what he was coming to recognize as her stubborn face, and he knew it would be difficult to change her mind. Besides, if truth were told, he had no doubt he could count on her, both emotionally and as his wingman in a fight.
“You stay close. Just in case.”
She grabbed hold of his hand, leaned into his side, and rubbed her hand along his back. “Close. I’ll have your back.”
He grinned then, remembering the last time she’d had his back and his front and virtually every other part of him. Her smile and the glitter in her eyes communicated that she remembered it as well. Pushing onto tiptoe, she swept a quick kiss across his lips before urging him forward.
Adam gripped her hand tightly as they stepped onto the beach. The sand was heavy, soaked from the prior rains. A low-lying mist lingered, swirled around their feet as they pushed ahead.
“They said in front of the lighthouse, right?” he asked, wanting to make sure they were walking to the correct location.
Bobbie looked all around, a furrow of worry in the middle of her forehead. “That’s what they said, except no one is here.”
They reached the hard-packed wet sand, and the mist continued to eddy around their feet. Suddenly a flash of lightning illuminated the ocean and the sweep of black fins cutting through the surface.
“Dolphins,” Bobbie whispered with a note of awed delight.
In Adam’s head came a strange buzzing, like static on a radio. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and from the side of his eye caught movement as two seagulls swooped downward. They glided down on the storm breeze onto the sand about twenty feet away from them and strutted back and forth, pecking at the sand. Normal, but something about them seemed off to him.
“Adam,” Bobbie said, and tugged at his hand.
He looked at her, but she was intently staring ahead.
Tracking her gaze, he noticed the pod of dolphins again as the lighthouse beacon swept across the water. It was a sight he’d seen more than once along the shore, but these dolphins weren’t moving parallel to the beach. They were swimming straight for them, and as they did so, the drone in his head intensified. This time he understood it for what it was—the hum of power. Coming off the dolphins.
Another pass of the beacon illuminated the surface of the water.
The fins disturbed the surf barely ten feet from shore. A jagged spike of lightning, dangerously closer, lit up the ocean, revealing four black shapes rising out of the water.
Humans. Or at least they would be soon, he thought, taking note of how arms slowly pulled away from the sleek dolphins’ bodies. Their noses flattened and the area around their faces became normal.
Darkness descended for seconds before the rotation of the beacon illuminated the now-human-looking quartet striding toward him and Bobbie—three men and a woman dressed in black.
Lightning flashed above them, followed closely by the rumble of thunder, as the incoming storm was now nearly directly overhead.
As the four came ever closer, the push of power was so strong he could almost feel it buffeting him. Their bodies were limned in a soft crimson aura, reminding him of a red sky at night. He took a step back, but Bobbie laid her hand on his arm and softly said, “It’s okay, Adam. It’s your—”
“Parents,” he finished as two of the group, a man and the sole woman, sloshed out of the surf while the two other men stayed back. As another flash of lightning erupted above them, he realized it was the two men who had tried to grab him in the parking lot.
His parents were barely ten feet away when another flare of light erupted, horizontal lightning, slamming into one of the men lingering near the surf line, tossing him back several feet where he collapsed into the waters.
Adam’s parents pivoted quickly in the direction of the spike of light. Adam tucked Bobbie behind him and whirled in the same direction.
Before them on the wet sand, roughly twenty feet away, there were two men instead of the seagulls that had been there just a short time earlier. In the blink of an eye, tendrils of energy erupted at the palms of their hands and wove themselves into bright balls of power.
Adam glanced toward his parents. They were crouched low, standing close together, his father shielding his mother with his body. Another blast came, close to their feet. Too close.
“No,” Adam said softly, as memories slammed into him. Memories of this happening once before. Of Salvatore grabbing him, pulling him away as he tried to hold on to his mother’s hand. Of a bolt of energy slamming into him as Salvatore dragged him toward a nearby building.
“No,” he repeated more loudly, and took a step toward them, so caught up in the past that he failed to see the dangers of the present.
“Adam,” Bobbie called out, which was followed by the deeper echo of his name.
Suddenly
Bobbie threw herself in front of him.
The blast hit, and Bobbie fell back toward him, but so did another body.
“Dad,” he said, as Salvatore tumbled into a heap on the sand beside Bobbie. He lay deathlike while beside him Bobbie’s body spasmed from the force of the ball of power.
Fury tore through him, more potent than anything he had ever experienced. He raised his hands to the skies and cried out his rage as a blast of lightning lit up the night. Descended from the heavens straight into his hands.
With another roar he deflected the power across the sands, striking the two men who had attacked them. Like fireworks in the night sky, they burst into brightly colored embers before his eyes. Just like that, the danger was gone, but the damage was done.
He dropped to his knees beside Bobbie and his dad. Bobbie’s aura flickered, veins of silver and red spreading through her like poison. She gazed at him, silently pleading for relief. He was about to touch her when his mother fell to the sand beside him and stayed his hand. “Let me. You do not know enough to deal with the Shadow force tainting her.”
Nodding, he shifted away and watched as his mother placed her hands at the uppermost edge of Bobbie’s aura. Slowly she inched downward, and the streaks of red and silver were drawn to his mother as if she was a magnet for the poison.
His mother’s body trembled as the energy slipped into her, but beneath her hands Bobbie’s body calmed, and little by little, her aura returned to its normal sapphire hue. His mother released Bobbie and slumped into his father’s arms, obviously drained. As his father held her, Adam reached down and embraced Bobbie, clutching her to him tightly.
“I’m okay,” she said, weakly at first, then more strongly. “I’m okay. Salvatore took most of the hit. He jumped in front of you also.”
Salvatore. He lay facedown just a couple of feet from them. Motionless.
Together Adam and Bobbie moved toward him, knelt beside him, and carefully flipped him onto his back. Wet sand clung to his face as sightless eyes stared at the night sky. Burn marks marred the front of his shirt directly in the middle of his chest.
Bobbie placed her fingers at his throat, searching for a pulse, then shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Adam.” Tears fell down her cheeks, shimmering thanks to a weak flash of lightning from the passing storm.
Adam stared down at the man who had been his father for twenty years, the man who had betrayed him—and yet, there had been good times. And love. In the end, love had won out, he thought as he took Salvatore into his arms and held him.
Grief poured through him. For the time he had lost with his parents. For the sacrifice Salvatore had made on his behalf.
“Kikin,” his mother said, and laid her hand over his as he held Salvatore. With gentle pressure, she urged Adam’s hand upward to a spot directly above Salvatore’s chest and the marks from the electrical blast.
“Focus,” she said. “Another attack could be imminent. We must act accordingly.”
Bobbie sat back on her haunches, still feeling weak, watching as mother and son leaned close together, and at a spot beneath their hands a silver-red glow emerged.
“Focus,” she heard Selina repeat, and Adam screwed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, engaged by the command in his mother’s voice.
His mother, Bobbie thought again, and looked up, searching for Adam’s father. His real father. He was slogging through the surf, where one of his fellow Hunters emerged from the waters, carrying his partner. The man was limp weight in the man’s arms. Adam’s father helped him haul the man to shore, where they laid him down gently on the wet sand, heads bowed over their fallen comrade.
Another death, she thought, and looked up the beach toward the spot where their attackers had stood, but the space was empty. As the beacon flashed over the spot, the sand where they had stood glistened like ice.
Weird, she thought, but then a vibration pulled at her core, dragging her attention back to Adam and his mother. The light emanating from beneath their hands was ever stronger, almost blinding, but then came a flash and Salvatore’s body jumped. Another pulse erupted, almost as strong. A new spasm followed, only this time there was movement as Salvatore’s foot wiggled, and the sound of a sharply drawn breath filled the night. Selina shifted away then, her face looking ashen beneath the light of the beacon as it swept over them.
Bobbie reached out a hand to her and Selina clutched it, locked her gaze with Bobbie’s.
“Why?” Bobbie asked.
Selina glanced back at where Adam held Salvatore. The other man weakly lifted his hand. He patted Adam’s head in a fatherly gesture before his hand fell back limply to lie across his stomach. When Selina looked back, she said, “Sometimes love isn’t easy to understand.”
As if that statement roused some previously unconnected thought, Selina peered over Bobbie’s shoulder, searching for her husband. Shadows crept into her gaze as she turned it to where her husband and the fellow Hunter knelt beside the body on the sand.
“I must go,” she said, but took a moment to pass her hand tenderly over Bobbie’s cheek.
Bobbie came to her feet, wobbly at first, but resolve stiffened her spine and kept her upright. She took the step or two necessary to kneel by Adam and did so, circling his shoulders with her arm and kissing the side of his face as he held Salvatore.
He raised his head then and offered up a ghost of a smile, but then looked around, searching for his parents, fear in his eyes once more, as if he were that lost young child again.
Bobbie lifted her hand and pointed in the direction of the shoreline, where his parents knelt beside the body of their injured friend.
“Would you watch him?” Adam said, inclining his head toward Salvatore.
Bobbie nodded and shifted to hold Salvatore’s head in her lap. He was a sickly green color and bathed with sweat, but alert.
Adam surged to his feet and approached his parents, guilt and worry driving him. When he stood beside them, he could see the weakness of the man’s aura and the faint spidery lines of silver and red, like hairline cracks in an eggshell.
“He’s too far gone,” his mother said, and her head sagged sadly.
His father embraced her as the other man knelt beside them, his features hard as granite, glaring at Adam, his gaze almost accusatory.
Adam dropped to his knees beside them. “There must be something we can do. Something like what you did with—”
“Nothing, except salvage his energy,” his father said brusquely, and looked at him. It was like staring into a mirror and seeing an older version of himself, Adam thought.
“Quinchu, we must act before it is all gone. We cannot waste even a drop of his life force,” the man beside him cautioned.
“Mother?” Adam questioned, and she raised her tear-stained face to him.
“They are right, son. There is nothing to be done for Eduardo.”
The three laid their hands upon the man, and then his mother reached for Adam, took hold of his hand, and guided it to the man’s body. The buzz began in his head, and as his fingers brushed along the man’s aura, he sensed its weakness and how his power feebly flowed through his body.
A faint flash of lightning came near as the tail end of the storm fled quickly above them. Adam lifted one hand to the sky and focused on the eddies of power swirling through the clouds directly overhead even as the three beside him concentrated on their nearly dead friend. Reaching deep within himself, he tapped the core of power gathered there, visualized it summoning the similar energy high up in the turbulent clouds.
Bobbie experienced the profound pull of Adam’s energy within her center, and a glimmer of light slowly coalesced into a ball in Adam’s hand. Before her eyes, the light from his palm reached upward like a searchlight, illuminating the heavens.
Suddenly a zigzag bolt of lightning traveled along that path, straight into Adam’s hand. Before her eyes a blood-red light burst forth from the five Hunters and grew ever stronger as the heavens continue
d pumping bolt after bolt through Adam.
The thunder began a millisecond later, loud and disturbing, making her jump at its unexpected violence, shaking the ground beneath them with its force as it rolled over and over across them, thrashing the space along the beachfront until Adam closed his hand and dropped his arm.
The lightning stopped as easily as if he had flipped a light switch. A final rumble, like the ringing vibrations of cymbals, followed before the night grew preternaturally silent.
“Adam,” Salvatore said weakly and patted her arm, his movements frail and uncoordinated.
She peered across the distance and the haze that had grown thicker with each blast of energy. She made out the outlines of Adam, his parents, and the one man. One by one they rose, and then suddenly a fifth body joined them from the mist covering the ground near the shoreline.
Adam turned and marched toward her, his face grim, but softening as it fell on Salvatore. Once again he knelt by Salvatore and took hold of his hand. “We have to get you to a hospital.”
“Home. Take me home, Adam,” Salvatore insisted, his voice faltering. His gaze grew unfocused for a moment until it settled on Selina as she approached.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“As am I. Thank you for saving my son,” she replied, and glanced at Adam. “We will wait for you, Kikin. Bobbie knows where to find us. Be safe. This is only the beginning.”
With that Selina motioned to the men with her and they quickly returned to the sea, wading deeper and deeper until their bodies changed color. Arms disappeared and heads tapered to sleek lines as the Hunters morphed back into dolphins and sank beneath the wind-whipped waves.
Bobbie stroked a sweat-soaked strand of hair from Salvatore’s face. She wanted to hate him, but she couldn’t. He had saved not only Adam, but possibly her, by jumping in front of the blast from the Shadow Hunters.
“He needs medical attention,” she said, but as father and son exchanged a look, she knew her plea would go unheeded.
The Lost (Sin Hunters) Page 24
