“Because their Khayals were slaughtered. And you see the pattern, right? Just look what our government is doing now. They’ve been killing Khayals since the nineteen-thirties.” He shutters. “There are more people out there, people who know about the Khayal, you know? I’ve been trying to clear my head, decide what to do about it.”
“Why doesn’t everyone know about the Khayal?” I squint up at him, chewing my lip.
“After centuries of being hunted, they’ve learned to avoid large populations. Plus, the supernatural isn’t easy to accept, and for some it’s too much. They’d rather not know.” He adjusts his leg, bouncing a foot. “It’s easy to ignore the Khayal with all the distractions of normal life. I had no idea, before—did you?”
“Not really. I mean…” I shrug. “There were times I’d think I’d see something from the corner of my eye. But I didn’t know.”
“And how could you?” He considers me for a fleeting moment. “What method did SEEK use to train you, meditation or blindfold?”
“I took to both,” I admit, sitting taller.
“Have you felt any Khayal since…” He points to the faint scare on my leg. “How long has it been, five-six days?
Obscure memories peck around the edges of my consciousness, like my nose cracking in the muddy gravel, everything turning dark and waking up days later in Medical. I clench my hands, biting back a creeping sensation shivering over my spine. “What did you mean a Khayal chose to save me?”
“That scar on your leg isn’t from a Khayal.”
“It’s not?” I raise an eyebrow.
“No. What’s the last thing you remember before you got hurt?”
“I was trapped in the Boone, the forest where we hunt. I got separated from my team.” And then, like a movie on fast-forward, the memories explode. “There was a mountain lion! I used most of my arrows on her but she wouldn’t go down. When she attacked I stuck my knife in her and she ran off with it.” I cringe remembering the Cougar’s teeth ripping into my leg.
Jonathan pats my arm gently as if seeing inside my head.
“I was dazed, and lost, wandering in circles until eventually I found a familiar path. But it was too late. The Khayal had already surrounded me. I panicked. I was miles from camp and bleeding all over the place. I ran until I saw the medical unit. Then I fell, broke my nose, exhausted and weak, I couldn’t get up.”
Jonathan nods along as if he knows what I’m going to say before I can even form the words.
“Ah! A Khayal jumped on my back and…” I reach for my neck, eyes wide.
Jonathan grabs my shoulders and spins me around, pushing my hair to the side before whirling me back again. “Here, look at mine.” He lifts his messy black curls and there, centered over his cervical, is a bite mark in a perfect circle.
“Oh my God! Why is it green?” I gasp.
“Khayal venom is better than tattoo ink.” He tosses his head, curls falling haphazardly over his mark.
I raise my hand to graze my neck. The tiny bumps rise to the slightest touch. “Ah! It moved!” I shriek, jerking my hand away.
“It’s waiting for your call.” Jonathan grabs my hand.
I start to pull away, but he holds my arm tight. “Just watch. She won’t hurt you.”
Before I can run his arms constrict over my shoulders, his chest pressing into my back. The scent of something masculine and woodsy lingers under my nose. The feel of his hand protectively on my shoulder makes me want to melt into his side.
“Mayet, I need you,” he calls.
In an instant, the wind blows, swirling around us like a mini dust devil. I wait, holding my breath. Then, across the river bend, a glowing green ball of light peeks up over the trees. I squirm against Jonathan’s grip.
“Shhh, wait,” he whispers, “just watch.”
The luminescent ball grows, pulsating stronger with each yard it hovers nearer. Five feet from us, it morphs. First legs and arms, then wings and a head burst from the shape. And before I understand what’s happening, floating before me like a dream is a dazzling winged girl. I’m mesmerized by her huge green eyes set wide on her tiny face. She’s much smaller than I am, and she’s stunningly beautiful. But the weirdest part is she’s pale green everywhere; hair, lips, skin, clothes, every bit of her…green.
“This is a shitty trick!” I stomp on Jonathan’s foot, thrust my elbow in his gut and run, clinging to my last bit of sanity. I lurch over boulders, bounding up the hill as fast as my legs will go, refusing to accept that what I’ve just seen is real. Because if it is, everything SEEK taught me was a lie.
“Follow her,” Jonathan grunts behind me.
“Keira,” a beautiful voice sings on the wind.
I freeze midstride, breathless. I can’t run away. I can’t even cry. I turn slowly, convinced I must be hallucinating. Fairies—if that’s what she is—don’t exist.
“Did you drug me?” I shout at Jonathan, trying not to look directly at the floating green figment of my imagination.
“Keira.” The weightless girl calls my name again. “Do not be afraid.”
“Keira, wait!” Jonathan lunges, one hand cupped on his crotch, limping toward the creature. Her featherless wings fold straight into her back as her pointed ears lay flat like a mad cat.
I slink backward, wearily rubbing my eyes, wishing I could dissolve into the trees.
“Okay. It’s all right. I know this is—well—shocking, but this is a Khayal,” Jonathan says, a note of pride ringing loudly in his words.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
“I know. I know. It’s hard to believe because you’ve been told differently. But this is my Ka. She’s part of my soul. Her name is Mayet. She can take us to your Khayal. Please relax,” he pleads, extending his hand. “You have to bond, before it’s too late.”
A handsome stranger offering to save me with his green fairy? I shake my head, muttering and making no sense.
“Please listen, Keira.”
My gaze slips from Jonathan’s face to the girl’s, if that’s what she is, to her huge, round, bug-like eyes filled with innocence. She gazes back, as though expecting me to figure something out.
“Have you ever seen a Khayal?” Jonathan asks.
A sensation of hot bubbles boiling under my skin starts at my feet and creeps up my legs, spreading beyond my torso and into my ears where it becomes a heavy buzzing. “Yes! I’ve killed hundreds of them and they don’t look like that!”
The spritely girl cups her face in her hands and begins to sob.
I squeeze my eyes closed, wishing her away.
“You’re a huntress,” Jonathan gasps.
“Was a huntress,” I grumble, visualizing Harnel swearing me into Ops.
Jonathan frowns at the sad-faced Mayet and turns his pity on me. “The Khayal are not the charred pile of debris you see when you kill them, Keira. When they die, their beauty evaporates. That’s why their bodies decompose instantly. It’s really rare that they chose to save a huntress. They must’ve seen something particularly noble in you.”
The girl’s head tips toward Jonathan as though they’re deep in conversation.
Jonathan’s jaw drops abruptly. “O-oh!” He spins back to me with laughter in his eyes. “You’re underage! You tricked Kistall? Well done.”
I clasp the seam of my shorts, digging a toe into the fluffy bed of pine needles. “How the hell…? Is she reading my mind?”
Jonathan nods. “Sort of, the Khayal have a collective conciseness with each other, but they read human emotions.”
“Whoa. No, nope. It’s too…uh ugh. I don’t—” I jab two fingers into my ears. It doesn’t help. I can still hear him, still see her.
“Mayet says there’s not much time. You have to decide, bond with your Khayal, or die.”
I think of Lindy. “And I’m just supposed to believe you, and her?” I point, finger trembling.
“I think you’re missing the obvious answer here. Did SEEK tell you this is what the Khayal looked l
ike? Would you have killed them if you’d known? Could you kill Mayet now?”
My throat burns as I look at the creature’s child-like face. A tear tickles the corner of my right eye. “I don’t—no, of course not.”
“Do you need any more reason to believe?”
I shake my head, tears spilling freely down my hot cheeks.
“I’ll help you, Keira. The Khayal will help you, but you have to let us.”
“Say I believe you…” the voice of a frightened little girl squeaks out of my mouth. “What happens next?”
“We go to where you were bitten and then Mayet can help us. She sees the connection between you and your Ka,” Jonathan says.
“That’s impossible. I was bitten on the SEEK compound. If we go in none of us will come back out.”
SEEK owns me, and now this mission is starting to make sense. Dr. Solomon had to have known what the change in my eye color meant. He knew exactly why my leg healed so fast, that’s why he was reluctant to release me. And Captain Roselle, he knew he couldn’t hide me, so he sent me to Ops, to Harnel, and Harnel mentioned my eyes specifically, said I was the “right fit” for this mission.
“God! I’m so stupid!” I swipe the tears roughly from my face, flicking them off my fingertips.
“This mission was never about you. This mission was about me. They want me to die. No, they wanted me to kill you first, and then die.”
Change of Plans
I pinch my brow, wondering when this whole mess started.
“We don’t have to be in the exact location. How about the forest where you met the cougar?” Jonathan asks, as though reading my mind.
“The Daniel Boone National Forest,” I say with final determination.
Jonathan nods to Mayet. She winks in return and blows me a kiss. I cup my cheek as she floats away in her bubble.
“No time to waste.” Jonathan sweeps an arm up the trail.
I square my shoulders, marching beside him in silence, his eyes always on me. I manage to ignore it for a while, but eventually the silence is deafening.
“Were you studying psychology at Brown or something?” I ask, catching my toe on a rock, totally unlike like me.
Jonathan gentlemanly pretends not to notice and answers without missing his cue. “Hardly, I was studying Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I dabbled in parapsychology though. That’s how I learned about the Khayal. It was an accident really, but I don’t regret it.”
“You’re on both Kistall’s and Episteme’s Most Wanted lists. How could you not regret it?”
“Hmmm…good question.” He nods, swiping a leaf from an oak tree and picking at it. “I’ve given myself a new crusade. I guess you could say I’m now a paladin for truth. The Khayal have been wronged and I’m going to prove it. Besides, as long as I stay out of Kistall custody no permanent harm can come to me.”
“You are in Kistall custody. SEEK is owned and operated by Kistall, remember? So what, now you’re invincible because of the Khayal?”
“Of course not.” Jonathan wipes the glistening sweat from his face on his t-shirt as we cross the deserted ridge leading to the hotel. “They can only heal flesh wounds, nothing that affects the brain. One could die from mental illness, a gunshot to the head, cranial bleeding, and stuff like that.”
“That makes sense,” I say, wishing away the festering ball of dread in my stomach that says we’re both making America’s Most Wanted by nightfall.
“I know how you feel,” he says, pulling me to a stop in the hotel parking lot, his expression suddenly brooding.
“No. I doubt very seriously that you have any idea what it’s like to put your sister in a wheelchair, lie to your family, and then be lured in by a complete stranger with his pal, who by the way looks an awful lot like Tinkerbelle’s cousin, and have your whole world turned inside out!”
Jonathan blinks at me.
“Sorry. I needed to vent.”
“Let me tell you how it happened for me.” He hooks my elbow and begins strolling slowly between cars. “Two years ago I was researching mystic phenomenon at the Stone Gardens in Georgia. There’d been reports of black shadows in the trees near the Adams Family Graves. A true family. Weird, right?” he asks. “My buddies convinced me it was for scientific research. Only we weren’t supposed to be there. The graves are on private property and we were trespassing. The police showed up and chased us. My buddies flipped out and scattered. I was lost in the woods for a few days. It was February and I was freezing and hungry. I cut my hand trying to start a fire. That’s when Mayet chose me. I tried to write it off as a hunger induced nightmare, but I started seeing her bubble everywhere and by day five she started speaking to me.”
“Five days? That’s how long it was before…” I trail off, chewing a cuticle and remembering the disembodied voice calling my name.
“You’ve heard her.” Jonathan nods, looking pleased that I can’t deny it any longer. “Yeah, there’s an incubation of five to seven days after a Khayal bite before we can hear them. I’m not really sure why. Mayet doesn’t think in terms of facts and figures so I can’t get an answer from her,” he says, a small frown playing with the edges of his bottom lip.
“What?” I ask, realizing we’ve stopped walking and he’s studying my face like a science project. I run a hand self-consciously down my ponytail.
“You don’t look underage,” he mumbles with a lopsided grin as we get moving again.
“Shut up.” I scowl. “I turn eighteen in a few months.”
He’s still grinning as we pass the courtyard. “Oh, only a few months,” he mutters under his breath.
We reach his door. He pulls the keycard from his back pocket, slides it swiftly through the card reader and goes in, letting the spring-loaded door swing back.
I shove my foot against it. “I can’t leave you alone.”
“Find me irresistible, do you?” Jonathan beams at his own cleverness.
“Don’t be flattered. I’m underage remember.” I lean against the door, arms crossed, looking the other way.
“Trust me.” He leans in and breathes in my ear, “I won’t forget.”
It shouldn’t matter to me what he thinks. I’m more adult than most girls my age. But it does. And the smell of cleaning disinfectant and room deodorizer does nothing to mask his inviting scent. I prop the door wider, watching him scurry around the room neatly collecting his things.
“Your turn,” he says, holding the door for me to go out first.
“I’m next door.” I nod, leading the way.
“Lord, did a mall throw up in here? I didn’t peg you for the shopping type,” he says before he even gets one foot inside my room.
“Six grueling hours, wasted,” I groan, stuffing the mounds of colorful frocks back into my bag.
“Is all of this for me?” He chuckles, lifting a sundress and holding it out in front of me, tipping his head as though imagining how it would look.
I wrench the frilly garment from his fingers and shove him out the door, face burning. “Just go.”
“We have time if you’d like to change.” He turns back to the room.
“Don’t try to snake-charm me by sending me into the bathroom to change so you can disappear.”
“I’m hurt,” he teases.
“Get out of here!” I snort.
I peer up a good five inches, studying Jonathan. He looks a little older than nineteen, probably because he needs to shave. And he’s funny, like Cord. But he’s not Cord. He’s not my friend.
The smile fades from my face. What would Cord think if he knew I’d been bitten? Would he see me as the enemy? All of the rumors about hunters going off to Ops and never returning suddenly make sense. Did the others die?
We scurry through the courtyard with our arms loaded, a blue fringed scarf dangling from my duffle. Absently, I watch a man dressed in solid black going into a room on the other side of the fountain. At first I don’t think anything of it – I’m more concerned about dropping my la
ptop while digging for car keys – but just before the man slips out of sight, I catch the burnt-orange stains on his boots. My gaze roams over his bulging biceps, head shaved to a quarter inch and the lump in the back of his jeans, probably a Beretta 9mm.
“Ops. Go!” I push Jonathan forward, never taking my eyes off the agent’s door.
“Hey!” Jonathan protests.
“SEEK’s sent someone to check on my progress,” I say.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean Ops is here to make sure neither of us lives to expose their secrets.” Heat burns inside my chest as I scramble into the parking lot. “Oh, shit! That’s why they gave me this friggen car, so they can track me. And I’m sure that has GPS too.” I point to Jonathan’s Beamer.
“Here, hold these,” Jonathan says, handing me his bag.
Unfazed, Jonathan strolls to the SEEK Hummer, and then to a white minivan with Alaskan plates. All the while, scribbling on a touch-screen tablet.
“No problem,” I say, balancing his junk and mine. “But what exactly are you doing? We don’t really have time to…”
“I’m trading GPS signals from one car to another,” he says, opening his car and whipping out a Leatherman.
Arms cramping, I drop all of our gear on his hood with a thud.
“Hey—oh, never mind. I’ll never see this car again anyway.” He shrugs and unscrews his ICUCK license plates.
I watch Jonathan’s back, checking that we’re alone. He quickly gets to work, swapping plates with the Ops agent’s black Suburban.
“I wish I could see the look on his face when he gets it.” I laugh.
“Let’s hope you don’t get that chance. We should go.” Jonathan rushes now, grabbing up our stuff and jogging to the Hummer.
“So, we’re safe, just like that they can’t trace us?” I ask, unlocking the car.
“Just about.” Jonathan snaps the battery out of my laptop and tucks it under his chin.
“Hey!” I frown.
But Jonathan digs his fingernail the empty cavity and holds up a tiny silver chip. He drops it to ground and smashes it with his boot. “Sorry, your cell phone has to go, too.”
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