Storm of Visions

by Christina Dodd

  “We have never needed our allies as much as we do now, and you all know more than we do. We depend on you to tell us the traditions of the Chosen Ones, and to be tolerant when we are forced to make new ones. Please do come.” Isabelle was soft-spoken, yet her authority could not be denied.

  Martha placed her soft, wrinkled hand on the pile; then McKenna placed his atop hers. Irving’s long, dark fingers were next, then Caleb with his hand palm down, and Jacqueline’s left hand atop them all.

  It was as if she closed an electrical circuit. Something warm, bright, and hot flashed from the mark on Jacqueline’s hand up through everyone’s palms and back through her.

  They all jumped.

  They laughed, and slowly, one by one, they pulled their hands back.

  “It’s a sign.” Irving raised his champagne flute in a salute. “We are doing something right.”

  Everyone raised their glasses.

  “Because of you, Jacqueline.” Caleb caught her bare hand and kissed her palm. “Because of you.”

  Not far away, in a private New York hospital, a nurse’s aide bent over the comatose form of Gary White. She bent his legs, back and forth, trying to slow the atrophy that ate at his muscles. She rolled him from his side to his back, trying to ease the bedsores that had formed under his hips and spine. She switched the empty IV bag for a full one, checked to make sure the drip was the same steady drip as it had been for the last four years, delivering fluids and nutrients to a hopeless patient.

  As she prepared to leave, to finish her rounds, something caught her attention. A movement from the bed.

  She turned toward the patient, sure she was mistaken.

  But for the first time in four years, his eyes were open. He was staring at her, and she froze, mesmerized by his gaze.

  Slowly, using muscles that were thin and wasted, he worked himself into a sitting position. Balefully, he glared at the dripping IV bottle. Viciously, he ripped the tubes from his arm. “Get me my clothes. I’m getting out of here.”

  She backed away, groped for the door, and ran shouting down the corridor. “Doctor. Doctor! Come at once. Come and see. A miracle has happened!”

  Read on for a sneak peek

  of book two in

  Christina Dodd’s

  The Chosen Ones series

  STORM OF SHADOWS

  Available from Signet in September 2009

  “I’m looking for the antiquities librarian. I have an appointment. I’m Aaron Eagle.”

  “Yes, Mr. Eagle, I’ve got you on the schedule.” The library’s administrative assistant was gorgeous, lush, and fully recognized his eligibility. She smiled into his eyes as she pushed the book toward him. “If you would sign in here.” She pointed, handed him a pen, and managed to brush his fingers with hers. “And here.” She pointed again. “Then if you don’t mind, we’d like your fingerprint. Just your left thumb.”“I’m always amazed at the security required to visit antiquities.” Aaron smiled at her as he pressed his thumb onto the glass set into the desk. A light from beneath scanned his thumb.

  “The Arthur W. Nelson Fine Arts Library antiquities department contains some of the rarest manuscripts and scrolls in the world, and we take security very seriously because of it.”

  “So if I made my living stealing antiquities, you’d know.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If I’d been caught.”

  “Thieves always eventually get caught.” She had him stand on the line and took his photograph.

  “I would certainly hope so.” He stepped onto a grate that shook him hard, then through an explosives screener that puffed air around him.

  She riffled through the piles of paper on her desk, compared them to the information on her computer screen, and smiled with satisfaction. “But you seem to be exactly who you say you are.”

  “I do seem to be, don’t I?” He leaned back over the grate. “Perhaps we could discuss your job tonight over drinks?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I’ll get your number on the way out, and we can arrange a time and place.”

  She nodded and smiled.

  He smiled back, headed down the corridor, and as he walked, he peeled off his thumbprint and slipped the micromillimeter-thin plastic into his pocket.

  “Just take the elevator down to the bottom floor,” she called after him.

  “Thank you, I will. I’ve been here before.”

  “That’s right. You have.” Her voice faded.

  The corridor was plain, painted industrial gray, and the elevator was stainless steel on the outside and pure mid-twentieth-century technology on the inside. The wood paneling was obviously plastic, the button covers were cracked and the numbers worn, and the mechanism creaked as it descended at a stately rate.

  But this was the Arthur W. Nelson Fine Arts Library, and their funding didn’t include upkeep on nonessen tials like a new elevator for the seldom-used antiquities department. They were lucky to have updated security in the last ten years, and that occurred only when it was discovered one of the librarians had been systematically removing pages from the medieval manuscripts and selling them for a fortune to collectors. If he hadn’t decided to get greedy and remove a Persian scroll, he might still be in business, but Dr. Hall had been the antiquities librarian for about a hundred and fifty years and he caught on to that right away.

  It was Dr. Hall that Aaron was on his way to see now. When it came to ancient languages, the old guy was a genius, and his specialty was prophecies, religious and otherwise. Which was exactly what Aaron needed right now.

  The elevator door opened, and he strode along another short, industrial gray corridor that led to a metal door at the end. He rang the doorbell at the side. The lock clicked, he turned the handle, and he walked in.

  Nobody was there. Whoever had let him in had done so remotely.

  The place smelled like a library: dust, old paper, cracking glue, broken linoleum, and more dust. Rows and rows of gray metal shelving extended from one end of the basement to the other, clustered in rows, lined with books.

  No one was in sight.

  “Hello?” he called. “Dr. Hall? It’s Aaron Eagle.”

  “Back here!” A voice floated over and through the shelves. A woman’s voice.

  They must have finally dug up the funding to get Dr. Hall another assistant. Good thing. The old guy could croak down here and no one would notice for days.

  Aaron headed back between a shelf marked Medieval Studies and one marked Babylonian Gods. He broke out from among the shelves into the work area where wide library tables were covered with manuscripts, scrolls, and a stone tablet.

  A girl leaned over the stone tablets, mink brush in hand, studying them. “Put it on the table over there.” She waved the brush vaguely toward the corner.

  Aaron glanced over at the table piled with Styrofoam containers and fast-food bags wadded up into little balls. He looked back at the girl.

  Her skin was creamy, fine-grained and perfect, and that was a good thing, since she did not wear a single drop of makeup. No foundation, no blush, no powder, no lipstick. She was of medium height, perhaps a little skinny, but with what she was wearing, who could tell? Her blue dress drooped where it should fit and hung unevenly at the hem. He supposed she wore it for comfort. He didn’t know any other reason any woman would be caught dead in it. The neckline hung off one shoulder; the bra strap on her shoulder was dingy, the elastic stretched and frayed. She had thin latex gloves stretched over her hands—nothing killed a man’s amorous intentions like latex gloves—and she wore brown leather clogs. Birkenstocks. Antiques. As the crowning touch, she wore plastic-rimmed tor toiseshell glasses that looked like an extension of the frizzy carrot red hair trapped at the back of her neck by a scrunchie that had seen better days . . . about five years ago.

  Yet for all that she was not in any way attractive, she paid him no heed, and he wasn’t used to that treatment from a woman. “Who do you think I am?”

  “Lu
nch. Or”—her glasses had slid down her nose—“did I miss lunch? Is it time for dinner already? What time is it?”

  “It’s three.”

  “Rats. I did miss lunch.” Lifting her head, she looked at him.

  He did a double take violent enough to give him whiplash.

  Beneath the glasses, dense, dark lashes surrounded the biggest, most emphatically violet eyes he’d ever seen.

  Like a newly wakened owl, she blinked at him. “Who are you?”

  “I’m. Aaron. Eagle.” He emphasized each word, giving time between for the village idiot to absorb the name. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Hall.”

  Aaron was immediately pissed. “I’ve met Dr. Hall. You are most definitely not Dr. Hall.”

  “Oh.” A silly smile curved her pale pink lips. “You knew Daddy.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Dr. Earl Hall. He retired two years ago.” Her smile died. “He, um, died last year.”

  “Dr. Earl Hall was your father?” Aaron didn’t believe that for a minute. Her “mentor” maybe, but Dr. Hall was way too old to have a daughter this girl’s age.

  Aaron frowned. Of course, Dr. Hall was way too old to be a “mentor,” too.

  Meanwhile, the girl babbled on. “I know what you’re thinking. Nepotism. It’s true. It’s also true no one is as qualified for the job as I am. Daddy saw to that. He tried to teach me everything he knew, but really, with a brain like his, how is that even possible? What cinched it for the library, of course, is that I’m cheap.”

  “Yes. I see that.” He also saw she wasn’t as unattractive as he’d first thought. Hidden under that dress, she had boobs—B-, maybe C-cups—some kind of waist, and curvy hips. She had good bones, like a racehorse, and of course those amazing eyes. But her lips were good, too, lush and sensual, the kind a man would like to have wrapped around his—“So let me get this straight. You are Dr. Earl Hall’s granddaughter?”

  “No. I’m. His. Daughter.” Now she spoke like he was the village idiot. “He married late in life.”

  “To somebody much younger.”

  “Not much younger. Ten years isn’t much younger, would you say? Mama was forty-two when she had me.”

  “And you’re twenty now?”

  “I’m twenty-seven. I’ve got a BS in archeology from Oxford and a graduate degree in linguistics from Stan ford, not to mention some more stuff like a stint teaching vanished languages at MIT.” She waved at a desk overflowing with papers, artifacts, and atop it all, a new Apple laptop. Her voice got louder and more aggravated as she spoke. “I’ve got all the papers in there if you need to see them. I’ve had to keep track of all that stuff because everyone thinks I’m twenty!”

  “Obviously, we’re all dolts.”

  “Yes.”

  He could tell it never occurred to her to deny it, or flatter him in any way. The girl was clueless about the most basic social niceties, and worse, she didn’t seem to notice he was a man.

  Why did he care?

  “When I was five, my mother died in a cenote in Central America retrieving this stone tablet.” The girl waved her hand at the table.

  He glanced at the tablets, then did his second double take of the day. He leaned over it, studied it with intense interest. “Central American. Logosyllabic. Epi-Olmec script. Perhaps a Rosetta stone for the transition between the Olmec and Mayan languages . . .”

  “Very good.” For the first time, she looked at him, noticed him, and viewed him with respect. Not interest, but respect.

  “I had no idea these existed.” His fingers itched to touch them, and he carefully tucked his hands into his pockets.

  “No one did. After Mommy died, Daddy brought them here and shut them in the vault. He blamed himself, you see, for sending her down there.” The girl was blinking at Aaron again.

  He couldn’t keep calling her “the girl,” not even in his mind. “What’s your name?”

  “Dr. Hall . . . Oh, you mean my first name.” She smiled at him, those amazing eyes lavishing him with happiness. “I’m Rosamund.”

  Didn’t that just figure?

  “My parents named me after Rosamund Clifford—”

  “The Fair Rosamund, King Henry the Second’s mistress, reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world.” Could this Rosamund be any more unlike her? “Henry built Rosamund a bower and surrounded it by a maze to protect and keep her, yet somehow the wildly jealous Eleanor of Aquitaine poisoned her and she died for love.”

  “Most of that is romantic fantasy, of course, but you do know your history. And your linguistics.” This Rosamund, plain, unkempt, and appallingly dressed, viewed him with approval.

  “History. Yes. That’s actually why I’m here.” He might as well give her a shot at his question. “I wanted to talk to Dr. Hall about a prophecy—”

  “My goodness.” Rosamund blinked at him again. “You’re the second one today to ask about a prophecy.”