“How do you know that?” she repeated. “When have they ever lost?”
Christopher glanced at his sister and saw the fear and worry in her eyes. “Anna, relax. Somehow, some way, it’s going to be okay.”
Anna made a noise in the back of her throat. “Mom always said you were the cup half full kind of kid.”
Christopher grinned. “Somebody has to be.”
Anna scanned the property line. “Christopher, I have to tell you something.” Her brother waited for her to continue. She swallowed and rubbed her thumbs with her forefingers, a nervous habit she’d had her whole life. She glanced at her brother. “I’ve been in contact with Julia.”
Christopher’s eyes bugged. “What?”
Anna winced and held her hands up, palms out. “I just wanted to know if she was all right. The same as you did with me.”
Christopher scanned the landscape and ran his hand through his hair.
Anna rushed to continue. “I used our special code! Do you remember? The one you used when you first contacted me?”
Christopher nodded.
“That way if it wasn’t Julia, nobody would know it was from me or you. She gave the right answer back, so I asked her how she was doing...”
“How long have you been in contact with her?”
“Since right after Mariya disappeared.”
Christopher’s eyes bugged again.
“I thought she could help us find Mariya. And you.”
“Women know nothing in the Barotkoff family, Anna. You know that.”
She leveled her gaze at him. “That’s what all the Barotkoff men think, but they are wrong. We are not stupid. We are every bit as cunning as the men, Christopher. We listen, we observe, and we talk.”
Their cells beeped simultaneously. They both looked at the message.
“The electricity is down. They’re there.” Christopher’s expression turned serious and he returned his attention to sweeping the landscape. Anna did the same. It wasn’t long before they saw a very large bird take off straight up from just inside the tree line of the property.
“I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that’s Kat,” Anna remarked.
“Dollars to donuts?” Christopher asked.
Anna smirked. “It’s a phrase Peter uses sometimes.”
“Oh.”
The bird climbed high above the trees, veered to the right, and headed further into the property before disappearing. The bird was gone less than five minutes before it returned, screeched loudly, and headed straight for Christopher and Anna. The bird swooped right over their heads and into the trees. Christopher could have brushed its feet with his hands if he’d stretched them up high enough. He turned in time to see the flash of Kat’s shimmer and her hurrying out of the trees toward them. The expression on her face made his stomach drop to his feet.
“They’ve found something. It’s too late.” Her breath caught. She pulled her cell out and tapped on it with shaky fingers.
“Can we at least try?” Anna offered. She stood on the balls of her feet, ready to rush toward the sheriff and his men. “We can at least try, can’t we?”
A flash caught their attention and they turned to see Alexander hurry toward them with the same grim expression on his face.
“Let’s get over there and at least try, Christopher. Please!” Anna begged. She took two steps toward the property, as if drawn there.
Christopher grabbed her arm. “We can’t, Anna. There are at least fifteen men and you heard Dimitri. He believes they may have been shifted. If they have been, we will have no explanation for our presence there or anything else. It would only make things worse.” He turned toward Kat and Alexander. “What did you guys hear and see?”
“I saw them pulling that machine along and they stopped right on two side-by-side areas of naked dirt. From my view up above, they totally looked like graves! There were even some dead flowers on them!” She shook her head and bit her lip. “Uncle Dimitri wanted...wanted those poor people to have...some respect, so he...” She sobbed.
“The sheriff yelled that they’d found something,” Alexander finished for his sister. “They were staring at the machine and two of them even gave each other a high five.”
“Oh, no.” Anna covered her mouth with her hand.
Kat’s phone dinged. She glanced at it. “Uncle Dimitri said to get home now.”
Christopher grabbed Kat’s head between his palms and pressed a quick kiss to her lips. “It will be all right, Kat.”
She sucked in a deep breath and nodded, but she didn’t believe him for a second, no matter how badly she wanted to. The foursome sprinted toward the car and drove home in silence.
The sheriff had indeed found something, and now had enough evidence to merit more investigations and possible warrants. He had not, however, had the foresight to seek such warrants ahead of time. So, he could not immediately begin digging up the area where he had detected the skeletons.
Just before he and the others drove off in triumph on that day, he uttered ominous words to Dimitri, “You better hope them bones is long dead Indians, boy. Otherwise, you and your family are in a heap of trouble.”
This time, there was nothing Dimitri could say or do that would stop what was to come.
PETER SWALLOWED HARD. “The warrant for your arrest just came through.” He looked up from the computer screen and stared at his father. “I imagine they’ll be here any moment.”
Dimitri ran his finger slowly over his chin, back and forth, and glared at the screen. “Probably.”
He called an emergency family meeting in the only room in the garage that had a door they could close.
“What are we going to do?” Kat wailed. “This whole thing looks terrible, but none of it is our fault!”
Grim expressions covered every face, most especially the faces of Anna and Christopher. After all, they still bore the name Barotkoff. Christopher’s heart was especially heavy, and he hung his head with a deep sense of shame. The sheriff had returned within forty-eight hours of detecting the two skeletons with the machine bearing an expansive warrant to search the entire Wolff property which included exhuming and testing of the skeletons. They had found three more skeletons so far and the sheriff was determined to dig up every square inch of the property in search of more.
“I’ll find the long-dead family hamster, too, if you got one of those, boy!” the sheriff had declared with glee.
Kat huffed in impotent indignation. She leaped to her feet. “I am going for a run.”
“No,” Dimitri warned. “The reporters have been taking pictures with long view lenses. And you would have to stay away from the many roped off areas. We can’t give the sheriff any more ammunition with which to shoot us.”
“Ugh!” Kat cried and sat down hard in one of the chairs along the wall. Christopher sat beside her and rubbed her back, his face grim.
Every member of the family was for all intents and purposes a hostage on their own property. News vans and crews showed up within twenty-four hours of the latest discovery and camped up and down the road that led to their front gate, and several had even positioned themselves along the property line by the fence, which became its own story.
The family watched in horror the previous night as one local reporter came on the evening news for their opening feature.
“As you can see,” the reporter gestured excitedly behind him and then glared at the camera, “this quiet and otherwise unassuming family has their entire property surrounded by high voltage electrical fencing. But they’re out in the country with their nearest neighbors being several miles down the road.” The reporter leaned toward the camera and squinted. “It begs the question, why would they need such staunch security measures in the tranquil Georgia countryside? What are they doing and who were they hiding? Janet and Richard, back to you in the studio.”
It wasn’t just local, either. They had made national headlines. Their story dueled with coverage of the wild swings in the global financial
and energy markets. Both were sensational, but the Wolff Family Drama took center stage in the United States because it was more salacious.
To Kat’s horror, several old high school acquaintances took the opportunity to claim their time in the limelight and dish dirt on her. The one that riled her the most was her old nemesis, Courtney.
Courtney twirled her hair between her fingers and addressed the reporter. “We always knew they were strange. Really weird, you know? The girl I went to school with, Kat, was always the odd one out.” She flipped her hair, opened her eyes wide, and smiled at the camera. “I tried to be nice to her, you know, to make her comfortable and be a friend. But no matter what I did she was determined to be a loner.”
Kat’s mouth had fallen open. “She’s such a liar! She tormented me!”
Christopher had tried to calm her. “Don’t get worked up, Kat. It won’t do any good.”
Kat’s body had quivered with indignation.
Mariya’s voice jolted Kat back to the present.
“Dad, what are we going to do?” Mariya asked.
The look of fear in Mariya’s eyes was something Dimitri had not seen in decades and it made him sick to his stomach.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. But we’ll figure something out.”
“How? This time, how?” she persisted.
Dimitri wrapped his arms around her and kissed her scarred head with great tenderness. “We’ll figure something out. Our talents are wide and varied and unknown to them.” A hint of disgust dripped from his tongue as he gestured outside. He had never considered himself better than or greater than ordinary humans, and he still didn’t. But the family had never been in the limelight before, either. He pulled away from Mariya and paced the room in slow circles.
“They’re going to come and arrest you any minute, Uncle Dimitri,” Alexander said.
“Yes.” Dimitri stopped pacing and ran a hand through his hair. “What I want to know is why are the Barotkoffs doing this now? They have never brought any public attention from the authorities. Why now?” He slammed his fist into his hand.
“They are working on something big,” Anna murmured and stared at the far wall.
All eyes turned to her.
“Do you know something? If you do, please tell us,” Robert replied.
Anna met his gaze. “I don’t know anything specific, but I know that there’s always been a,” she searched for the right word, “master plan or something that Uncle Vlad has. As a female, of course, I was never privy to anything about it. But I do know that he has one.”
“How?” Anastasia asked.
Anna turned to her brother. “What is the family motto?”
“All and everything for the family and for Mother Russia,” Christopher recited without hesitation. That motto had been drilled into him from his earliest memory.
Dimitri nodded to Christopher. “Did you recall anything else, anything at all, from when you went back?”
Christopher shook his head. “No. If there is something, and Anna could very well be right, it would only be shared in the innermost circle of trust. I was never in that.”
“Who is?” Dimitri asked.
“Uncle Vlad, my father Anton, my brother Boris, and my cousin Andrei since his father David died years ago.”
Kat’s eyes bugged. “Your father is still alive? You never mentioned that.”
Christopher gazed at her. “It doesn’t matter, does it? He’ll never meet you, and believe me, you don’t want him to.”
Anna stared at her lap. Peter put his arm around her.
“Excuse me.” Dimitri left and returned quickly with a pad of paper and a pen. “I want to know every member of your family, please. Give me your family tree, only include those who are living.” He poised the pen above the paper and stared at Christopher.
“Why didn’t we do this sooner?” Steven asked.
Anastasia snorted. “Good question.”
Dimitri ignored them. “Christopher?”
Christopher cleared his throat. “All right. There is Uncle Vlad, of course. He’s the head of the family. His current wife, as far as I know, is Emma. She is from Russia and doesn’t speak English. He has no children. My father is his nephew, Anton.”
Robert held up a hand. “Wait. If Vlad is the last ideal’nyy rebenok as we believe he is, then how can he have any nephews or nieces? Weren’t they all sterile?”
“Yes, the legend is that all the ideal’nyy rebenok were sterile, but not all Vlad’s siblings were full siblings. There were half-siblings, too. They are not ideal’nyy rebenok.”
“Oh.”
“Continue.” Dimitri scribbled on the paper.
“My father has four living children. Me, Anna, Boris, and Julia.” Christopher looked at Anna briefly. “Vlad’s other nephew was David, who fathered Andrei, Irina, Mikhail, Nina, Nikolai, and Nadia.”
“Prolific,” Anastasia dead-panned.
Anna’s lip curled in disgust. “They were all born in six years. Their mother was considered a good breeder.”
“She died giving birth to Nadia,” Christopher finished quietly, then looked at his hands.
Dimitri finished writing and put his pen down. “Is that all?”
“That we know of, yes,” Christopher replied.
“So that’s eleven of them to eight of us,” Steven said.
“Not really,” Peter replied. He squeezed Anna’s shoulders. “The women, present company excepted, aren’t shifters. They aren’t involved in anything outside the confines of the home, so that means there are only seven that we need to be concerned with. Right?”
Dimitri held the pad of paper to his chest and slowly nodded. “I believe so.” His eyes landed on Anna. “Except there may be other female shifters, too, like Anna.”
“I always thought we were outnumbered,” Kat murmured. She glanced at Christopher.
“It’s not the straight up numbers that count, Kat. It’s the abilities and who can outsmart whom. Strategy.” Christopher waved his hand around. “Look at what they’ve done. We’re cornered.”
Steven stood up. “We are not cornered. We can all shift and just get out of here!”
“Really?” Anastasia countered. “All of us? So, we’ll leave behind Oksana, Rebecca, Granny, and Claire to go live where? In the woods?”
Steven looked sheepish. “I forgot. I’m sorry.” He sat down, deflated.
Granny reached over and patted his knee. He looked up at her with a grimace and she winked at him. She knew his young heart was in the right place.
“It’s okay, Steven. I appreciate your optimism,” Dimitri took a deep breath. “We have to formulate some sort of plan.”
They were interrupted by angry pounding on the door. Tension filled the room. Everyone looked around.
Dimitri handed the pad of paper to Granny, then opened the door wide. He was not surprised at who greeted him. “Hello, Sheriff.”
“Well, what have we got here, son? Are you all cooking up another gruesome scheme?”
Stanley McBarker ran right up to the sheriff and gave him a thorough barking out. Every bit of fur on his back stood on end. Kat swore you could almost make out actual curse words from the little creature. She appreciated his fierce sense of loyalty.
The sheriff frowned at the dog and nodded at his two deputies. “Cuff him, boys, while I read him a little story about the charges and his rights.”
Kat bit her lip as she watched her uncle turn around and put his hands behind his back. Christopher tensed beside her. There was nothing any of them could do.
Chapter Five
“Thank God for bail money!” Robert said after Dimitri had been released, who looked none the worse for wear after spending three days in jail.
Oksana threw herself into the arms of her husband and sobbed. She had insisted on coming and nobody argued with her. She was an emotional wreck.
“I’m all right, love,” Dimitri soothed.
Robert, Anastasia, Oksana, and Anna had come to co
llect Dimitri. There was a media circus waiting outside, so Anna made them invisible. They slipped right past the throng milling around the county courthouse. Nobody even looked up as they hurried along the side of the building, across the street, and down an alley to an unassuming rental car with dark tinted windows.
They could not, however, avoid the media circus that still camped around their property. Cameras and the faces of reporters were pressed up against the windows, all yelling and vying for a statement, as the five family members waited just long enough for the front gate to open and allow them to pass through.
“Vultures,” Robert grumbled as the car spat gravel out behind them.
When they reached the house and garage, Dimitri got out and turned his face to the sun. He inhaled deeply and smiled. “Ah!”
The rest of the family saw the approaching car and streamed toward Dimitri, smothering him with love. Even Stanley gave several happy barks and his tail wagged so furiously it was a blur. Sweetie deigned to leave the garage and grace him with a haughty stare.
“It’s good to be home, everybody. But it’s not over. I’m only out on bail.”
“Tell him, Mom,” Robert said.
Granny pulled herself upright and put her hands on her hips. “I think I can help with that.”
“Let’s get inside first.” Anastasia spread her arms wide to corral the family toward the garage.
Once everyone was settled in and they closed the large garage doors – something they rarely did during the day – Granny cleared her throat.
“I have a confession to make, Dimitri. I have shared bits and pieces of our...dilemma...with my gamer buddies. Now,” she held up her hand when she saw the look on Dimitri’s face, “don’t worry. You’ve known me long enough to know that I am very discreet. My gamer friends are great kids from all over the world. They have given me comfort and support. They worried about me after my episode and always ask how I’m doing and if I’m all right. They remind me how long I’ve been playing and tell me to take breaks. They’re good, Dimitri! I am careful. Anyway,” she paused to take a lungful of air, “several of them are also skilled hackers. They know a lot of what we’ve had to go through lately and are very upset that someone is messing with ‘one of their tribe’, as they put it.” She giggled like a school girl. “I’m part of a tribe, Dimitri! Can you believe it?”
Revelations: The Shifter Series: Volume Three Page 8
