Chapter 21
"And that's all I know," Fort Lauderdale homicide detective Samantha Brown, the sygkenis of Lucan, the suzerain of South Florida, said. "Sorry I couldn't be more help, Alex."
"No problem, Sam. I knew you were just a baby when they sent you south." Alex tapped the end of her pencil like a drumstick against her notepad. "One more thing: Did they ever tell you why they sent you all the way down to Florida for foster care placement?"
"Not that I remember. Wait, yeah, there was this one weird notation somewhere in my DCF jacket. Let me look." There was a shuffle of papers as Sam checked her personal records. "Here it is. It just a scribbled note by the CW caseworker in Chicago. Says I had allergies when I was a kid. They had to give me a bunch of injections."
Alex thought of what Charlie had told her. "What are you allergic to?"
"That's the weird part. Nothing. Not even penicillin." A wry note entered her voice. "Maybe I was allergic to Chicago."
After Alex hung up the phone, she carried her notes from the sitting room into the bedroom. "Any luck with rooting through the laptop?"
"I have not found any records on it that relate to the orphanage or the Brethren." He closed the device and turned to her. "Did Samantha offer any insight?"
"No. She knew she was born in Illinois and sent down south when she was a baby, but that's all. Nothing in her records to speak of, except a note about allergies she doesn't have." She flipped a page. "The very tough phone call today was Nick, once I tracked down her and Gabriel. They're over in Paris, looking for some missing Kyn and generally fucking with the Brethren."
Cyprien nodded. "Nicola is still not comfortable talking to us."
"Richard's wife killed her parents. She's entitled. But she likes me. Thing is, she didn't know she was adopted. Shocked the hell out of her, too." Alex made a face. "She said she has her mom's papers stashed at her farm, and she's going to go through them as soon as they get back to England."
Michael regarded her with a patient expression. "If you confirm that Nicola was also adopted, what will you conclude from that?"
Alex started counting off points with her fingers. "One: None of us remembers being in an orphanage in Chicago. Two: All of us are female. Three: We each had some strange ability before we made the change from human to Darkyn."
"Samantha has an ability?"
"Yeah, and it's worse than mine."
"How bad could it be?"
She looked at him. "If she touches the blood of murder victims, she has a vision of how they were killed. Front row seat to murder."
Michael grimaced. "That is worse than yours."
"What it boils down to is that we were all different before the Kyn ever messed with us," Alex said. "I'm superfast with my hands. Nick can find pretty much anything, and Sam never has to rent slasher flicks. Not what you'd call standard human operating systems."
"There is only one problem with your theory," Michael said. "Jema did not have a talent before she changed, and she was not adopted."
"Bitch just ruins everything, doesn't she?" Alex shook her head. "I still think there's a connection between us; I'm just not seeing it. But it could explain why the four of us survived the change from human to Darkyn when no one else has since the Dark Ages."
"Five."
She frowned. "I missed someone?"
"I spoke to Jaus," Michael said. "Liling Harper was human when she got on his plane."
"Well, hell." She tossed her notepad on the desk. "That blows my theory." She glanced at the calendar. "Hang on; they were only out there a couple of days. It took the rest of us weeks to make the change. How did she do it so fast?"
Michael moved his shoulders.
"You're a lot of help." She helped herself to a stack of the medical records they'd stolen from St. Benedict's. "I'm going to take these over to the lab and let John go through them."
"Is that wise, considering his condition?"
"There's nothing in them that would send him tearing off across the country, and I think I can stall him from trying to do anything else." She felt grim. "If all else fails, I'll need to borrow some manacles and chains."
Her brother was out of bed and fully dressed when Alex walked into the lab.
"I'm sorry, sir, but you can't discharge yourself without filling out the proper paperwork." She saw blood dripping from the dangling IV needle. "You did a nice job ripping out your line. What are you going to do now? Go and play with a chain saw in a bathtub filled with oil?"
He gazed at her steadily. "Cyprien told me you found another dormitory and medical files at Saint Benedict's. I was right."
"I was coming to talk to you about it." She didn't like his color. "Will you get back in bed before you pass out again?"
"I'm fine." He sat down on the bed. "What were they doing to us?"
"They gave us standard pediatric physicals," she told him. "The kind you give kids before you place them in a new environment, like foster care or with adoptive parents. Height, weight. BP, that's it."
"There has to be more." He grabbed the medical files from her and started flipping through them.
Alex leaned back against a table and decided it was time to sell him her phony theory. "Speaking as a physician, here's what I think. We were probably being used as part of some sort of clinical control group. Fifty to sixty kids would be about the right number."
He jumped right on that. "A group for what?"
"Different types of testing," she said. "Control groups of that size were very popular back in the seventies and eighties. Researchers would begin by testing fifty to a hundred random individuals who were healthy and disease-free. They graphed the results of each test, charting them by number of subjects and test values. It's how they determined the curve of normal frequency distribution. The largest number of identical test values was the norm by which all subsequent values were measured. It didn't hurt the kids. They were just randomly tested."
"That can't be right." John said as Michael came in and joined them. "Why would they test kids all from one place?"
"They didn't know any better," Alex said. "It was probably easier for them to use kids from one region. Their test results would have been flawed by certain factors the researchers didn't consider, like environmental contaminants and even geographical location." She gestured toward the window. "People who live in the mountains, for example, have higher levels of hemoglobin than people who live in the city at sea level. The body produces more red blood cells at higher elevations to compensate for the oxygen deficiency in the atmosphere. That sort of thing."
"Why use only orphans?" John said.
"The doctors wouldn't need parental consent, for one thing," she told him. "They might have taken kids from the same region for another reason, like compiling ratios of sentinel phenotypes among the poor." She saw the look John gave her. "Sentinel phenotypes are individual traits researchers use to track things like newly emerging diseases and recessive mutations. The traits manifest physically, either in the patient's outward appearance or in their lab results. Hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, and cancer are all sentinel phenotypes. They're statistically evaluated, so they would need a control group." And if he didn't start buying her lie soon, she was going to run out of fake theory.
John folded his arms. "That proves they were looking for something specific. Something abnormal."
Alexandra sighed. The problem with her brother was that he was no dummy. "All it proves is that they could have been simply testing us and using our results as a baseline for the really sick kids."
"Then why not test normal children? Why lock up the kids and have them sleeping next to a lab?"
"We don't even know for certain that they were locked up, John," she reminded him. "Hell, Charlie and I did a study a few years back on phenylketonuric mothers who gave birth to mentally retarded heterozygous children. I was able to prove that, thanks to too many cousins marrying each other, eleven percent of the population in a small town in Idaho carries the defect. I had two hundred people, including fifty-odd kids, staying at a study clinic for two weeks while we profiled their DNA and mapped out familial connections. It's a very specific type of study." She paused, caught up in her own lie for a moment. "The orphanage doctors wouldn't study a control group for something like that. Sentinel phenotypes can't be predicted among random groups of children unless…"
John imitated one of her favorite gestures by rolling his hand.
Everything Charlie said came rushing back to her. "Unless they knew the parents were carriers."
"I need some water." John walked into the bathroom.
"What does this mean. Alexandra?"
She gave Michael a blank look. "It means I'm a great liar, and my brother may be right."
He thought that over. "You do realize how dangerous ii will be to proceed from here?"
Alex felt as if he had wrenched her out of a smothering cloud. At the same time, she wanted to hit him. "I don't think I have a choice now."
"The truth about what happened to you and John when you were children may also reveal how you, Samantha, Nicola, Jema, and Liling survived the change," he pointed out.
"Which will then give me some idea of how I can change us back," she snapped.
He nodded. "But in the process, you may learn the exact method of how to change a human into Kyn."
"That's why we're not going to write down or otherwise share the information," she told him. "No more giving my research to the vampire king. And you're my failsafe. If things get bad, you're going to make me forget it."
The lines of tension around his mouth disappeared. "You would trust me to do that?"
"Baby, I'm counting on it."
John came out of the bathroom, his hands clapped over his ears. "Alex." He groaned and sank to his knees. "Something's wrong. Outside. Something's happening—you have to stop it."
"Stop what?"
His tormented eyes met hers. "Something terrible."
Liling felt Jaus relax beside her and go still as he fell asleep. She waited a little while, watching his face and wondering whether she had the strength to do this.
Love, she decided, would not be denied. Like Valentin, it demanded everything. And if she loved him, if she meant more than simply saying the words, she would have to give everything for him. If she didn't, he and his friends would die, just as all the people at the facility had.
She slipped out of the bed, arranging the pillows under the linens before she went to the closet. She dressed in the first things she put her hand on, a flowered, floaty shirt and a white blouse. She pushed her feet into a pair of pale green slippers and silently left the room.
She had felt his power growing steadily all night. Even when she was making love with Valentin, it had been in the back of her head, a silent invitation, tugging at her, trying to lure her outside.
Now it was swelling out of control, like his anger, creating a hum in the air inaudible as yet to everyone but her. If they had been far from water, it would not have frightened her as much, but Valentin's home sat next to one of the largest lakes in America. She knew that if she did not stop her twin, he would use the almost-endless supply of water to destroy the mansion. As strong as he was now, the end result might kill hundreds, even thousands of innocents and devastate the entire area.
She couldn't let him do it again.
No one detained her as she walked outside and down to the lake. She stopped only to stand for a moment in Valentin's gardens, to run her fingers over the pure white petals of his camellias and let the scent permeate her senses. It frightened her now to think that she might have gone her entire life never knowing him. But she had found him at last, and what they had shared had been real and enduring. Love worth protecting, love to stand and fight for.
If need be, to die for.
Valentin dreamed of the night that he had lost everything.
"Durand." He stepped into Thierry's path and raised his battle sword.
"Get out of my way, Jaus." The tall, angry man looked over him and then turned, breathing in deeply. "Jema. Where are you? Come to me now."
Valentin froze. Thierry called to Jema as if he had the right to her. As if she belonged to him. But she was his. "You cannot have her."
"She's already mine." Thierry lifted his sword. "Can't you smell her on me?"
He didn't feel his heart break. He felt his sanity snap. "No." He lunged.
Thierry parried the attack and returned it with interest, slamming his blade into Valentin's so hard that sparks flew between them.
Valentin had studied blade work his entire life, both as a human and as a Darkyn lord. He trained every single day. And so he attacked with every ounce of skill he possessed, determined to separate Durand's head from his shoulders, because that was the only payment he would accept for what Durand had stolen from him.
But the man he fought was not a practiced swordsman. He was the man who had been left behind to hold Castle Pilgrim until the last Templar had escaped. The man who alone had fought his way through a gauntlet of five hundred Saracens to reach freedom. The man who had left five hundred headless, armless, and lifeless bodies in his wake.
Durand does not dominate on the battlefield, the Kyn said of him. He makes it his charnel house.
"Jaus. Durand." Michael Cyprien stepped into the room, a human dangling between his hands. "Lower your swords. Now."
Jaus was in a cold, killing rage, and ignored the seigneur's orders. Thierry did as well. They circled the room as their swords clashed, slid, and danced, moving in patterns too swift at times for the blade to be clearly seen. They circled and sidestepped, gradually working their way into the ballroom, until they were battling in the center of the floor.
"Thierry, please stop this."
Valentin saw how Jema's voice had distracted Durand, and when the other man turned his gaze away from their blades, he took advantage of the opening and lunged.
"No!"
Jema appeared, seemingly out of thin air, directly between Valentin's blade and Thierry. There was no time or space to prevent what happened next. Valentin's rage became horror as he saw her step into the thrust, but it was too late.
His sword pierced Jema's abdomen and came out the other side of her body.
Thierry bellowed and brought his sword down on Valentin's arm. The razor-sharp steel sliced through flesh and muscle and bone as if they were made of butter. Valentin staggered, his eyes fixed to the stump that healed over as he watched. Thierry caught Jema's waist and pulled Valentin's sword out of her body. It fell to rest beside Jaus's severed arm.
Valentin opened his eyes, his hand moving to touch the scar encircling his arm. Carefully, so as not to disturb Liling, he got out of bed, pulled on his trousers, and went to open the curtains.
The moon's grin had widened, casting a wide net of ghost diamonds onto the lake. Just after the surgery Alexandra had performed to reattach his arm, he had stood here, in this very spot, watching the woman he loved embrace another man in the snowfall. It was then that his heart had turned to ice, and he had thought he would never warm again.
Until Liling, and her touch burned away all of his sorrowful yesterdays.
A part of Valentin would always love Jema. She had long been a dream that had made his lonely life bearable. Bui now that he had Liling, and real love that was not only welcomed but returned, sunlight filled his heart.
Full circle.
Storm clouds where there had been none before blocked out the moonlight. Jaus looked down as a small figure stepped over the seawall and walked down to the water. The lake began to churn in an ominously familiar way, and the air itself seemed to crackle as lightning began slicing through the sky.
Jaus pressed his hands against the glass, and then went over to the bed and jerked back the linens. Only pillows lay in her place; Liling was gone.
He went back to the window in time to see a column of water rising in front of Liling. It darkened and contracted and solidified into a man, the Asian man named Kyan who had attacked him at the cabin in Florida. He had the ability to control water as easily as Liling manipulated fire.
Valentin didn't wait to see what would happen next. He turned and simply ran.
Kyan gathered himself from the lake and rose from it, returning to the human form in which he had been born. The first time he had melded himself with his element, it had been such a glorious thing that he had almost not returned to his own body. But being water simply was, without thought or intention, and the order had taught Kyan that he needed more than that, that he had a responsibility to protect the helpless from the demons preying on them.
The girl stood on the shore, watching him change, seemingly as calm as he was furious. She smelled of sex and blood and flowers—the perfume of a demon's whore—but no fear colored her scent.
She needed to be reminded of who Kyan was.
He lifted his arms, drawing from the storm, luring and concentrating the water-laden clouds into the sky above him.
Around him, the lake water began to boil as it sent several whirling spouts up into the clouds, feeding them with water and power.
The girl mirrored his movements, and behind her the torches lining the seawall flared, shooting showers of sparks that fell like orange rain all around her. Some fell on the hedges of camellia at the edge of the garden, but she glanced at them and the embers died.
As before, the air between them began to ripple and stretch, changing as if in response to the two forces about to collide.
"You are not welcome here," she said to him, the air distorting her voice into a resonant echo.
The skin all over his body seemed to feel the words. "You speak Chinese."
"It was all we spoke for the first sixteen years of our lives," she told him. "They only used Chinese with us. They refused to teach us English so that we couldn't communicate with anyone outside the facilities. Or did they take that memory from you, too?"
Of course she would attack the Brethren. He should have expected it. "You are a liar."
"We were born here, in America." She said it in English, and then switched back to Chinese effortlessly. "That's why you can understand what they say, but you can't speak the language. We were punished if they caught us using any English words we overheard. Only rice and water for three days in the isolation room."
He shook his head. "The priests were kind to us. They brought us here from China. We would have starved if not for them."
"They took us from our mother. They may have even killed her in order to steal us. I have tried to find records, but there are none." Sympathy softened her eyes. "I will tell you everything I remember. They did not have time to tamper with my mind."
"You believe I would listen to your lies? Do you think you can control me so easily? I know what you have become." Rain began to fall, soaking them both. "How could you go to him? How could you let him put his filthy hands on you?"
She wiped the rain out of her eyes and glanced back at the golden-haired man behind the wall. "I love him."
He didn't need to use his mouth to speak to her. Then say good-bye to your lover. You can't run away from me this time.
I don't wish to. She moved toward him, and the space between them became crowded with seething shadows as the air thinned and seemed to tear. If you insist, we will end this tonight.
"Don't take another step, either of you." Melanie Wallace appeared, guns in both of her hands, and stretched out her arms in either direction, pointing them at Kyan and the girl. "If you do, I'll shoot."
The girl lowered her arms. "This is between us," she told her, never looking away from Kyan. "Move away before you get hurt."
Melanie turned her head. "Boys? A little help would be nice."
Two men in dark clothing came out of the shadows behind Melanie. They both held automatic weapons, one pointed at Liling, the other at Kyan.
One shouted a prayer in Latin as he raised the machine gun and began shooting at Valentin and the others standing behind the seawall.
Liling flung a hand toward one of the torches, pulling the flames from it and sending them in a concentrated, blue-white stream between the assassin and the Kyn. Bullets, partially melted, began dropping onto the rocks.
The other man fired directly at her, but Kyan sent a column of water from the lake, blasting the weapon and the bullets he had fired away. It slammed into the assassin, driving him into the concrete side of the seawall, where he fell to lie soaked and unconscious over the edge.
The girl regarded Kyan with surprise. "You defend me now?"
"Your life is mine," he snarled. "No one else takes it."
Melanie made an exasperated sound. "Men, always like dogs in the manger." She fired at him.
Before the bullet reached him, Kyan dissolved his form into a pillar of water. He saw Melanie fire her other weapon at the girl, who cloaked herself in a column of flames.
Kyan shifted back into his human body, and sent two streams of water to blast the guns out of the American girl's hands. "Melanie, leave us alone."
"Liling." The maledicti was running toward the flames.
The girl stepped out of the flames and smiled at the demon before she shook her head. Kyan saw two more of the Darkyn grab the golden-haired man and pull him back.
Kyan summoned the storm, and turned once more to face his sister.