Michael turned to Drew. “Is she doing this?” He almost had to shout.
“I think so,” she yelled, her words all but lost in the cacophony.
Suddenly, the storm stopped rolling in toward them. About fifty yards out, it started to pour. Drops burst against the surface of the sea, making a haze of splash-back. The flickering lightning was hypnotic. Booming made it impossible to think.
Rhiannon raised her arms, her hands still vibrating. Then, without warning, she dropped them, gasping. They all just stood there as the storm collapsed in on itself and disappeared. The rain stopped. The sky was blue—no sign of clouds. The water flickered dappled aqua-green.
Michael stared down at Drew, who looked a little frightened. Behind them, Rhiannon picked up her purse and her shoes. “Dear me. I almost got wet. But you get my point.”
“You ... you’ve got some kind of power.”
“You bet I do.” A hard edge of ruthlessness transformed her face from merely bitchy to something that might actually be evil. “You might say I’m your local weathergirl. And I owe my allegiance to someone whose power is even greater than mine. She brings the dead back to life, Dowser. And if you find this sword for her, she’ll give you Alice in payment.”
Michael was having trouble breathing. Alice. Sweet, angelic Alice. The woman he loved more than he loved his own life. There had to be a catch. “Alice without cancer?”
Rhiannon let out a peal of laughter. “When you come back from dead a little thing like cancer can’t hurt you anymore.” She sobered. “All you have to know is where she’s buried.” She peered at him. “You know that, don’t you Dowser?”
The hill in Virginia, green and white plaid with inset tombstones, burned in his memory.
She must have seen the look on his face. “Then we’re good to go.”
“Don’t do this, Michael. You can’t trust them,” Drew pleaded. Michael knew that the last thing Drew would want was Alice alive. But Drew hadn’t said it wasn’t possible.
Michael looked out at the sea and sky that had so recently boiled with a storm. The whole world had just changed. Drew was right. There was magic in the world. And Rhiannon was sure as hell a lot more than psychic. So maybe he and Alice were more than psychic too. Maybe this woman Rhiannon talked about could do what she said she would. “How do I know this woman, whoever she is, will stand by your promise?”
Again the annoying cascade of titters. “Oh, we’re going to want you to find a lot more things for us. You’ll be a treasured partner. Someone we’ll want to keep happy. Morgan will take both you and Alice into the Clan. We can do great things together.”
He had leverage here. That was good. He wasn’t sure he wanted this Morgan woman taking them in to some society but there was time enough to deal with that later. And really, what did he have to lose? Life without Alice had nearly killed him.
Until recently. He glanced back to Drew. The look on her face startled him. Devastated. Resigned. God, he’d never meant to hurt her. He should never have made love to her. She’d come all this way to find him. How? Why? Just because they both had some magic gene? But whatever the reason and however she’d found him, she’d brought him back to life in the last days. She’d freed him from his numbness. He couldn’t refuse to care that he’d hurt her.
“Drew....”
“I know,” she said. The rueful twist of her lip was like a knife in his gut. “It’s an offer you can’t refuse.”
He couldn’t. No matter whom it hurt. He turned to Rhiannon. “I’ll find your sword.”
The bitch (he had no illusions about that) smiled. “Welcome to the club. Come on.” She turned on her bare heels in the sand and gestured to the hired muscle. “Bring them along.”
That sounded bad. He glanced again back to Drew. If Rhiannon knew Drew had visions, she might want Drew for her little association too. Drew could have told Rhiannon about her visions. She hadn’t. So she didn’t want into this clan thing, and he had to get her out of this. She shouldn’t be involved in his deal with the devil.
“Whoa, whoa,” he said, holding up a hand as the hulking men closed in. “We don’t need her.” He could practically feel Drew wince. God, he was a bastard. But it was for her own good.
“She knows about the sword. Don’t want competition,” Rhiannon snapped. “She comes.”
These people were ruthless. They might kill Drew just because she knew about the sword. She had to be protected from them. There was one way to do that. It would hurt.
“Who would she tell?” He snorted derisively. “A college girl from UCLA? Like anyone’s going to believe her. Arthur’s sword. Right.” Just keep your mouth shut, Drew, he pleaded silently. It’s okay to be dismissed.
“Morgan doesn’t like loose ends.” Rhiannon turned and motioned to St. Claire like he was an annoying inconvenience.
“Look, I’m done with her,” Michael said. “I don’t want her hanging around. It killed him to know he was twisting the knife. “Let’s just make it easier for everybody, huh?”
Rhiannon turned, her face angry. Then she rolled her eyes and smirked. “Okay, Magic Man. I guess you’re right. Sorority sisters aren’t exactly a threat.”
As they all trudged off over the sand, Michael turned back to Drew. Walking backward, he tried to give her a look that said how sorry he was, how he didn’t mean it, but how he had to go anyway. Like she’d understand.
The tears in her eyes made him want to throw up. So he turned around, gut churning, and headed after the strawberry blond and her crew.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Drew watched them walk away, too shocked to think coherently. Her stomach started to roll as she felt the bond with Michael almost like a physical pull on her gut. Rhiannon had been the power behind St. Claire’s throne all along. And there was a real possibility she was part of the group who had attacked Tris and Maggie in Nevada, this “Clan” thing. But even if Drew told Michael that, she knew he’d still take any chance to get Alice back. He wasn’t a bad man. No one could resist that bait. Drew was the one who’d convinced him magic really existed. When Rhiannon raised the storm, it had made him sure.
She had no hold on him. Sure, she’d thought....
As he walked away, the connection she’d been feeling for the past hours seemed to rip and tear, taking most of her insides with it. Michael turned back once, his face contorted in pain, before he resolutely turned away and kept walking. As the party pushed into the wall of mangrove trees and palms, nausea overcame her and she fell to her knees, retching her breakfast into the sand. The pull to Michael was overwhelming, like a hook into her intestines. Her head pounded. She could feel him striding away. She knew exactly when he reached the clearing of the driveway in front of the cabin. She heaved again and again, uncontrollably. He was still now. Her heaving became sobs, and she fell over to lie in the sand.
As usual, she’d been blinded by her own desires. She’d gone from being certain of her destiny to being certain of nothing at all at warp speed in the last few dalys. She was the stupid college girl he thought she was, letting one man after another star in her fantasies as a white knight, right up until they broke her heart. She’d even seen this one coming.
It didn’t help. Her heart felt broken now, her body wracked with the physical pain to match her mental anguish. Her mother was right. She couldn’t fix this. In her blithe confidence, she’d always been sure things would turn out well. Maybe her mother had been trying to break it to her gently. Arbitrary. That’s what life was. Luck of the draw, and she’d drawn a bad hand.
She felt him go at last, receding faster now. Back down the little track. Out to the paved road. The bond between them stretched and thinned. She could feel him all the way out to Highway 1 and beyond. But slowly, the connection faded. Her temples stopped pounding. Her stomach steadied. He was on his boat now. Then he was gone.
And that felt worse than anything.
When she was sobbed out, she sat for a long time, trying to care enough about a
nything to move. But that was silly. She couldn’t stay here now. She stumbled back to the cabin. Puddles from last night’s rain stood everywhere in the unevenly graveled drive.
What to do? Go back to Miami and take the first flight she could get back to LA. Maybe not. The last thing she wanted was to face her family. Maybe she’d go to Paris and earn a meager living translating medieval texts. Her Medieval French was pretty good.
She leaned against the Toyota and looked up at the hot, blue sky. Her head fell forward onto her chest. The weight of the humid day was almost too much to bear. The edges of her vision began to darken and pull in.
She tried to breathe. What was happening here? A strange tingling came over her. She felt as though she was drifting away from her body.
The puddle at her feet shimmered. The muddy water cleared and there was a picture, clear as day, of Michael at the prow of The Purgatory, out at sea. He was in one of his trances. As she watched, mesmerized, he shook himself, chest heaving from the effort, and crawled back toward the wheel. Rhiannon pushed up to him through the men gathered in the stern. “What have you got?” she asked Michael. The words rang in Drew’s head.
“The course,” he said shortly, and went down into the cabin. Drew’s vision went with him. He rolled out some charts on the little dining table. At the edge he wrote some coordinates. It was as though Drew was peering over his shoulder.
Then the vision faded. The water wasn’t clear and shimmering anymore, just muddy.
Damn.
That was a real vision, a vision of the future, because Michael and Rhiannon and company couldn’t have made it out into open water yet. She couldn’t deny that she had a power.
And the man who had raised it didn’t want her.
*****
She turned her head. Jason removed the respirator so she could speak. She couldn’t do without it for very long anymore. “Does she have it?” she whispered.
“Not yet,” Jason said, his voice flat. It was all he could do to look at her, she knew.
“Age does this to you,” she wanted to shout. But it would take too much energy. She wanted to punish him for his disgust, but she couldn’t do it anymore. Luckily he didn’t know that. It was only the force of her will keeping her alive now. No one should live this long. Her mind wandered for a moment over leg-o’-mutton sleeves and pinched waists, riding with gentlemen in their carriages in the afternoon.... She was young and beautiful, and they did her bidding because they worshipped her....
“She’s got the Finder though,” Jason interrupted. “Shouldn’t be long.”
She snapped back to the present. The lapses in mental acuity frightened her more than her crumbling body. But she’d have the Talisman soon. “Make sure she calls in....” She was starting to gasp already. Lungs failing, along with everything else.
“She’s got a sat phone. I’ll tell her.”
“I want to ... know when ... he locates it.” She no longer had breath enough for a full sentence. A machine somewhere started to ping.
“You got it.” Jason’s eyes were fixed firmly on the floor.
“Tell her to ... bring it here....”
“Chicago. Check.”
She motioned for the respirator, and he put it between her opened teeth. Her lips had long ago pulled back from her jaw.
“Out,” the hefty nurse ordered as she walked into the room. “What you doing bothering Miss Le Fay with all your nonsense?” She hustled Jason out of the room. “I bet you had that respirator out, didn’t you?”
“No ma’am,” Jason said as the door closed on him.
Morgan let the oxygen fill her lungs as the respirator wheezed and pumped. Rhiannon better get here with that sword. Or she’d what? She’d die. Unthinkable at one point. But there it was. Death was so close, even as she was so close to success.
*****
Kemble, Tris, and his father were all dead tired, half from trekking across the country, and half from worry and anger at Drew. His father had been practically psychotic by the end of the flight. He’d kept saying, “How could she think an Italian was the One?” Kemble had had to give Tris his Rolex to take apart and put back together in order to keep him from exploding all over first class. It had been running slow. It was back on his wrist now, keeping perfect time, another reminder of the skill they’d always undervalued in his little brother.
Kemble didn’t have a power, but he had his computer and the plane had Internet. He’d phoned the producer of Treasure Hunter while they waited in the airport. Michelangelo Redmond, a.k.a. Dowser, was a drunk and a derelict, but his boat had been the one Brandon St. Claire insisted on using. How could Drew have been so foolish? The producer had given him enough information to dig deeper. He’d spent five hours digging around, hacking various public and private systems. What he had found was shocking. Guy was living really low profile now. Kemble couldn’t even get an address. But there was plenty on his past. War hero. Saved a Delta Force unit outside Kandahar but got captured himself. Spent over a year as a prisoner of war. Hospital records were nauseating. But he lived. Ran some kind of charity with his wife after he got stateside. Wife was dead now. Heir to a company that made glues and fixatives. But he hadn’t been heard from in a couple of years.
Kemble didn’t tell his father or Tris. He wasn’t sure even he wanted to know so much personal stuff about the guy. Easier that way. When they found “Dowser,” Kemble was going to beat him within an inch of his life if he’d taken advantage of Drew. He’d have to ace Tris out for the chance. Tris had been mumbling about various kinds of bodily harm as he played Rubik’s cube with the Rolex.
When they’d landed, it was rent a car, grab breakfast, and trek down Highway 1 through the Keys. It had all taken too long. When they had gotten to the run-down marina on Stock Key, they’d pried out of the old guy there where Redmond lived only when his father had pleaded that he was looking for his daughter and described her. Who could resist that?
Now it was late afternoon, nearly two days after he’d first realized Drew had flown the coop. The Taurus they’d rented jolted down the track overhung by trees that dangled menacing roots over the car. They’d driven past it three times before they finally got the turn. When they entered the clearing, he wasn’t sure this could possibly be the right place. The house (if you could call it that) was dilapidated to the point of structural failure. Not Drew’s style. But there was a 1997 Toyota parked in the gravel. Maybe Drew’s? She had to have bought a car, because she would’ve had to use a credit card to rent one, and she’d been very careful not to leave a trail Kemble could follow. Kudos to her for choosing a reliable brand. He peered up at the shack. Drew sat in the shadows of the wraparound porch above them. His father leaped out of the still-moving car and ran toward the house, his steps slowing as he realized Drew was holding herself, arms wrapped around her ribs, rocking slowly back and forth.
“I’ll kill him,” Tris muttered and took off after his father.
Kemble pulled up beside the old Toyota. Things were not okay with his little sister. Cold fury washed over him. He was not about to let Tris claim the honor of beating the guy to a pulp.
He got out, watching as his father reached Drew. She didn’t look at up at him. Bad sign. Kemble crunched through the gravel.
His father didn’t try to touch her. “Hi, Drew,” he said softly.
Nothing. Just the rocking. As Kemble got closer, he could see she’d been crying, but there were no tears now. Tris hovered at his father’s shoulder, obviously at a loss for what to do.
“You okay, honey?” His father leaned back to look through the screen and the open door to the shack. Kemble raised his brows in question. His father shook his head. If Redmond was here, he wasn’t immediately visible.
“You were right, I guess.” Drew said, finally. She quit rocking and looked up at them.
His father was smart enough not to say anything.
“I’ve been really stupid.” Her voice cracked. “Kemble wouldn’t have been that st
upid.”
The look on her face made Kemble take a chance. “Yes, I would,” he offered, a little hesitant. “If I thought I’d found the One.”
His father smiled kindly. “You just seem to think you’ve found them more often than most, honey.”
She looked up sharply then and Kemble relaxed. That was the old Drew. Don’t let him talk to you like that, he thought. Suddenly all his simmering anger at her for worrying them disappeared. He admired his little sister for going after what she believed was hers.
But then her eyes filled. “Oh, there’s no doubt about this one. Magic as hell. Raised mine, too.” Her voice caught, and she stopped like she couldn’t go on.
Kemble caught his breath. His father went on full alert. “You got magic, honey? But that’s wonderful. What is it?” All his father had ever wanted for his children was for them to find their destinies and their powers. Kemble just felt depressed. He was the oldest and now two of his younger siblings had come into their powers before him. It was starting to look more and more like he wasn’t destined to find his at all.
Drew’s gaze went back to dull. “I see visions of the future. In water, it looks like.”
“A Seer,” his father said, voice hushed. “Honey, that’s the most coveted of any power.” He lurched forward and grabbed his daughter’s shoulders. “Oh, Drew. That’s amazing.”
“Yeah. Who’d have thought? A girl gets the brass ring.” She stood. “A history major can tell the future. Not sure it’s really all it’s cracked up to be, though. Hard to tell just what you’re seeing mostly, or when it’s supposed to happen.”
His father gathered her into his arms, and surprisingly, said just the right thing. “I never loved you less because you were a girl. How could I think less of females?” He smiled down at her. “Your mother wouldn’t let me.” Drew’s watery chuckle turned into full-on sobbing. His father rubbed her back. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “It’s going to be all right.” He looked over her head at him and Tris and shoved his chin toward the house.
He's A Magic Man (The Children of Merlin) Page 17
