by Sandra Hill
Her flushed face and white-knuckled fists on the steering wheel gave lie to her statement. It had meaning, all right. To her. Even though it happened long ago, it must represent rejection . . . a father who favored one family over another. And slavery, of course. A plantation this size couldn’t have prospered without slave labor in those pre–Civil War days.
The decision was taken out of their hands by the man who walked around the side of the building, his long blond hair hanging smoothly to his shoulders, his handsome face framed by thin war braids intertwined with crystal beads the same shade of blue as his eyes. It was Ivak, coming from what appeared to be a rose garden. He carried a shovel in one hand and a headless snake in the other. Smiling, he said, “Welcome to the Garden of Not-So-Eden, brother. Do you think Adam had this problem?”
“Probably,” Harek said through the open window, laughing.
At his side, he heard Camille murmur, “More pointy teeth.”
“Who would have thought that a Viking warrior would be reduced to warring with reptiles?” Ivak said to him. “No matter how many I kill, they keep multiplying. Like Saxons. Or loaves and fishes. Yeech!” He tossed the creature off into some bushes and wiped his hand on his denim braies. The shovel he propped against a tree.
Camille turned off the engine, and they both emerged from the low-slung car.
Ivak shook his head, then arched his eyebrows at Camille. “Is this the life mate?”
Harek could see the disbelief in Ivak’s quick assessment, and somehow that bothered him. It was acceptable if Harek criticized her plainness, but he did not want others to do the same. Besides, she was not, not, not his life mate.
“Trond has a big mouth,” Harek commented, and motioned for Camille to come closer. “Ivak, this is Camille Dumaine. Camille, my brother Ivak.”
She extended a hand for Ivak to shake, which rather jarred Ivak, who was more accustomed to women hugging him, or other things. Ivak was the best-looking of all the brothers, which was saying a lot, and he milked it for all it was worth. Harek could see that Camille shared all womankind’s appreciation of Ivak’s charm, because she was smiling.
She didn’t look half bad when she smiled, by the by. In fact, she was halfway to pretty. More than halfway. There was a certain appeal in unadornment, he was beginning to see.
Then, surprising them both, she said to Ivak, “And, no, I am not his life mate, or soul mate, or even girlfriend. I’m just the driver.”
“Ahhhh,” Ivak said, and winked at Harek. If there was anything a Viking man appreciated, it was a woman with spirit.
“Hawk, Hawk,” a childish voice squealed as a little person waddled out the front door and across the upper verandah, followed by his mother, Gabrielle. Hawk was the closest the toddler could come to pronouncing Harek.
Harek took the steps two at a time before the child would topple over the edge and raised the child high in the air over his head. “Hey, Mikey, who’s a big boy? Walking already! I’ll bet you can run, too.”
Mikey giggled, and drool dripped down onto Harek’s forehead. He squirmed out of Harek’s embrace, then showed just how well he could waddle/run from one end of the verandah to the other. Over and over.
Harek smiled at Gabrielle and said, “Bet he wears you out.”
“You have no idea,” she said, and hugged Harek warmly. “I’m so glad you came. We missed you at Easter.”
“I was in Siberia.”
“I know,” she said with a laugh.
Everyone thought it was funny, that he was sent repeatedly to such a cold, dismal place. It was not funny. Suddenly he had an epiphany. Maybe Mike knew about his Caribbean hideaway, and that’s why he kept sending him to icy regions. Naw! If Mike knew, he’d turn his island into a pillar of salt, or a volcano, or something.
Ivak was coming up the steps with Camille.
Harek introduced Camille to Gabrielle and said, “One of Camille’s ancestors lived here at one time,” which was all Gabrielle needed to hear. She took the still-running Mikey by the hand, promising him a cookie and milk, and led Camille through the open, double front doors, which were framed on either side by tall, narrow, etched glass windows. “You have to tell me everything you know. I have old pictures I can show you, but there’s so much we can’t find out about the plantation’s history.”
Camille gave Harek a frown over her shoulder, probably because he’d disclosed her connection to Heaven’s End, but she followed Camille inside. “I doubt I can add much,” she said, which was a whopper of a lie if he ever heard one.
“We’ll be eating in an hour,” Gabrielle called back to her husband.
“Good. Can you send out a couple of beers, sweetling?”
“Sure thing, honey.” The look Ivak and Gabrielle exchanged then was one he noticed among all his brothers and their spouses, and often at the most inappropriate times. Like now. It was none he’d ever experienced himself. One of such incredible intimacy. Love, but more. ’Twas enough to make a grown man gag.
He and Ivak sat down in the low rockers and propped their long legs on the rail. Now that he was up on the verandah, he could see all the numerous five-gallon cans of paint and drywall compound, along with brushes and rollers. They were soon enjoying cold long-neck bottles of Dixie beer brought by a female ceorl, who nodded mutely when they thanked her.
“Cnut told me more about your mission,” Ivak said right off. “Will you be needing me and my vangels?”
“Possibly. I should know more in the next few days.”
“Are you sure Lucies are involved with Boko Haram?”
“Seems likely, considering the depravity of some of their actions. Beheadings. Mass murders. Rape. Unspeakable torture.”
Ivak nodded somberly. They all knew of Jasper’s talent for inventing new methods of gaining information from captives. Even vangels shuddered with fear.
“It’s going to be touchy, working so closely with the SEALs and other operatives, keeping your vangel identity secret.”
“Tell me about it,” Harek said. “But we’ll manage. We always do.” He glanced around the seemingly peaceful setting. “Are you rid of Lucies at the prison?”
“Most of them. Especially with Dominique gone.” A few years back, they’d managed to annihilate one of Jasper’s high haakai, Dominique Fontaine, who had operated out of a New Orleans restaurant headquarters called Anguish and had even infiltrated Angola Prison, where Ivak was a chaplain. “Every once in a while, a stray one wanders in. Be careful in New Orleans. There’s likely a few rogue demons still remaining.”
That made sense. The evil in Angola would lure a Lucipire, as would the decadence of the Crescent City, even when there was no major Jasper mission involved.
A honking horn drew their attention then. Coming to a brake-screeching halt, right behind Camille’s Benz, was a lavender, 1960s-vintage, Chevy Impala convertible. Driving it was a grinning Leroy Sonnier, Gabrielle’s ex-con brother. Riding shotgun was the Cajun midget troublemaker—okay, that was politically incorrect—the petite Cajun matchmaker/folk healer Louise Rivard, best known up and down the bayou as Tante Lulu. She was as old as dust, but that didn’t stop her from having bright red hair, or from wearing hot pink biking shorts and a T-shirt with the glittery logo, “Let the Fun Begin.”
Before, Harek had suspected he was in trouble.
Now, Harek knew he was in trouble . . . big trouble. Michael was sending in the big guns.
Chapter 8
Stormy weather on the horizon . . .
Camille was a mess, and not just her hair, which tended to frizz after a day in this humid heat with no air-conditioning. AC was about number seventeen on the list of priorities for the Heaven’s End restoration project, Ivak had told them, unapologetically, as they ate lunch under a whirring ceiling fan. He had installed a historically incorrect rain forest shower in an upstairs bathroom, though, he’d added, also unapologetically, in case anyone needed to “cool off.”
“Does Mike know about that sybaritic addition?” Harek had as
ked. He often used big words, Camille had noticed, and not for particular effect. He seemed to think in dictionary mode when he wasn’t sounding like a character from a medieval movie.
“Mike was the first one to try it out,” Ivak had replied. At Harek’s dropped jaw, Ivak had hooted, “Just kidding.”
“Who’s Mike?” Camille had asked.
“Our boss,” they both said at the same time.
“You both have the same boss?” That was odd. A security specialist and a prison chaplain working for the same company?
“Don’t try to figure it out,” Gabrielle had interjected. “It’s a family thing.”
That was clear as bayou mud.
In any case, it wasn’t the heat and humidity that was causing Camille’s problems. No, she was an emotional wreck from all the shocks of the day. She should have just rented a hotel room after her fitting this morning and slept the day away, her head covered by a blanket, until it was time for her bridesmaid obligations. She got a headache—another headache—just thinking about the evening to come.
Sadly, Camille felt safer and more at peace as a special forces agent back at Coronado and on live ops abroad than she did here in the South, fighting her past. A psychiatrist would have a heyday analyzing her screwed-up psyche.
It was bad enough that she was strolling around the plantation where her ancestor, a slave owner, had raised his legitimate family, which felt like a betrayal of sorts to her namesake grandmother, but she was nodding and smiling until her jaw hurt at the renovations being made to the old mansion (did she really need to see the bedroom where dear ol’ granddad slept with his wife?). Next, she would be dropping by her father’s “other” home in Lafayette to visit his longtime mistress, the floozy (a romance author, for heaven’s sake!), and hanging with her twin half sisters, whom she had never met in person and vowed she never would. They were—surprise, surprise—grad students in philosophy, or French literature, or something else equally esoteric, at Harvard University. Her father must be very proud. Her brother had met them at one time, when the girls were in high school, and said they seemed nice. Camille had told her brother he was an idiot.
She couldn’t dwell on her father’s not-so-secret life, or she really would go off the deep end. Not really, but she might scream or growl or punch something, which would call attention to herself, and she’d really rather be invisible, one of her greatest assets in WEALS.
Back to Heaven’s End. She should have been appalled at the old slave quarters, but she couldn’t fault what they were now . . . charming cottages to house Ivak’s staff, who, incidentally, had the same pointy incisors as Harek and Ivak and Trond, and they weren’t even blood relatives. Weird, that’s what it was. She sensed a mystery here that she needed to figure out. Later. Maybe they were some kind of cult who filed their teeth that way? Modern-day vampires?
A chocolaty vampire at that, in Harek’s case. If she wasn’t so full from the delicious lunch of shrimp étouffée, lazy bread, tomato salad, and the sinfully decadent Peachy Praline Cobbler Cake that Tante Lulu had brought, she would probably be licking Harek up one side and down the other. She still might.
I really am losing my mind.
And speaking, rather thinking, of that friend of the Sigurdsson family, Tante Lulu . . . holy moly! The dingbat old lady voiced an opinion on everything, especially her favorite saint, Jude, whom she worked into every conversation thread. He was apparently the patron saint of hopeless cases, and Camille could have sworn that Tante Lulu looked directly at her when she’d imparted that fact. But then Harek had exclaimed, “Are you saying I’m hopeless?” Maybe Tante Lulu had strange eyes, like those portrait paintings that, no matter where you stood, the person seemed to be staring at you.
“We’re all hopeless, at one time or another,” Tante Lulu had replied in all her homespun wisdom. “Truth ta tell, cher, I come t’day ’cause St. Jude whispered in mah ear that there was someone in need of our help.”
Harek had about choked on the beer he’d been sipping at as they’d relaxed around the dining room table. (And that was another thing. In between beers, Harek and Ivak had been quaffing down cardboard containers of something called Fake-O, which they drank with grimaces on their faces. Odd!) But then Tante Lulu’s rheumy eyes turned to Camille, and she knew it was she that the old lady had in her crosshairs. Camille was hopeless, all right, hopeless as a hooker in a Junior Miss pageant.
Harek sat next to Camille on one side of the table, facing Leroy and Tante Lulu on the other side, with Ivak and Gabrielle at either end. Tante Lulu sat on two cushions to compensate for her height. The child Mikey had been put down for a nap, kicking and screaming, a while ago by his nanny, Elsa, another pointy-teeth person. Like a little Energizer bunny, Mikey kept going and going, tiring everyone out and eventually himself. He was adorable.
Gabrielle’s brother Leroy, who’d recently gotten his master’s degree in social work from the University of Tennessee and was about to start a job running a halfway house for Angola parolees, had been flirting with Camille ever since he arrived. Probably because she was the only single female there. And she’d been flirting back at him, mostly because it seemed to annoy Harek, and she was annoyed at Harek for blurting out her dubious connection to Heaven’s End.
Actually, Leroy was a fascinating person, having served time in prison for murdering his abusive father. Tante Lulu, who was a friend of a friend of practically everyone in Louisiana, had helped procure his release. In any case, Leroy seemed to have a genuine interest in her work with WEALS.
“Would you like to come see our operation?” Leroy asked her. “We’re having an open house at Gateways on Monday.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Harek answered for her.
She kicked his leg under the table. “I’d love to see it, Leroy. Maybe next time I’m back in Nawleans.” Not that she intended to come back anytime soon, but if she did, she would.
“Give me your e-mail address and cell number, and we can keep in touch,” Leroy suggested. “Maybe I can come out to Coronado sometime, get the grand tour.”
“No, no, no. Camille will be too busy. An upcoming mission and all that. Very hush-hush.” Harek was repeating her exact words, the ones she’d used last night to describe his work to her brother.
She stamped his foot with her foot. Hard.
He winced, but smiled warmly at her. Fake warmness. What was up with that?
“Harek and Camille are soon-to-be life mates,” Ivak blurted out. He was leaning back in his chair, enjoying the interplay.
“We are not!” she and Harek said at the same time.
“I doan know,” Tante Lulu interjected. “I’m thinkin’ St. Jude mus’ have somethin’ in mind fer you two, ta have me skedaddlin’ over here t’day.”
The old lady had already given Camille a St. Jude medal on a silver chain, a plastic statue that would fit in her purse, and a prayer card.
Tante Lulu glanced sideways at Leroy beside her. “Or mebbe it’s you he has in mind fer Camille.”
Leroy pretended delight and said, “Yippee!”
Gabrielle giggled, “You better beware, Camille. When Tante Lulu decides to matchmake, you are a dead duck. I know from experience.”
“A very pretty dead duck,” Ivak added, winking at his wife. “I enjoyed plucking you as I recall.”
“Tsk, tsk!” Tante Lulu said with a grin at the sexual innuendo.
Harek grumbled, “Bloody hell!”
“Camille, I could call mah niece Charmaine over at her beauty shop in Houma and get ya in fer a last-minute appointment if ya want. She’d get ya gussied up real good fer the weddin’.”
“Uh, thanks, but no thanks,” Camille answered. “I can handle it myself.” If Tante Lulu’s red-dyed hair, heavy foundation complete with rouged cheeks, and the purple enameled nails were any indication, she could definitely do better gussying herself.
Even though lunch had been early, it was already one p.m. and they needed to head back to the city. Cam
ille glanced at Harek and he nodded, understanding her silent message.
“Hate to eat and run, Ivak, but Camille and I need to hit the road. She has a lot of gussying to do back at Evermore.”
“Evermore?” Ivak asked.
“That’s the name of Camille’s family home,” Harek informed his brother, and the two of them exchanged a look.
“Leave it to you!” she thought Ivak murmured to Harek. “Be careful.”
“Be careful of what?” she asked Harek.
“Riches,” he said enigmatically.
Camille nudged Harek with her knee. “My mother’s already sent me thirteen text messages. If I don’t return soon, she’ll be sending out a posse.”
He nudged her back and added a quick pass of his palm over her thigh, up high. When she glanced his way, he just waggled his eyebrows.
“Are you two playin’ hanky-panky under the table?” Tante Lulu inquired. “No singin’ hymns afore the gospel!”
“I’m a great singer,” Harek told Camille.
“Get real,” she said, and stood.
“I think she likes me,” Harek confided loudly to Ivak, as he stood, too, along with all the others at the table.
“Hey, you’re a Viking. Women can’t resist Vikings,” Ivak reminded his brother.
“Puh-leeze! Not the Viking stuff again,” Gabrielle said with a groan.
“ ’Tis true, heartling,” Ivak told his wife. “In the old days, back in Viking times, women from all countries invited Norsemen into their bed furs because we were more handsome and brave and virile than their men, even on their best days.”
Gabrielle laughed. “And because Viking men bathed more often than others.”
“That, too,” Ivak agreed, coming around the table to give his wife a quick kiss.
Harek turned to Camille, as if about to give her a kiss, too.
“Don’t even think it,” she warned, although when he smiled like that, the smell of chocolate was overpowering.
“I swear, you are so hot, you could make my hard drive melt, and, believe me, my hard drive is very hard at the moment,” Harek whispered in her ear.
