Authors: Susan Squires
But Morgan turned the power of the Wand on Michael. He went reeling backward as a wavering beam of light hit him.
Kemble tore his attention from the struggle and fumbled for the cord. He wouldn’t be any help to Michael. He had to get Senior back on life support. He shoved the machine back toward Senior’s bedside.
“
Morgan.” A female voice cut through the power that was humming in the air. “We have five dead, at least. We can’t afford those losses. Come away while we can still retrieve them.”
Kemble
shoved in the plug and glanced up as the respirator made a humming sound to begin the reset process, a process Senior couldn’t wait for. Morgan’s arm was shaking. Tris’s kneeling form was silhouetted in the doorway against the Wand’s light. Michael was plastered up against the far wall, holding his head. Two men dragged corpses back toward the foyer.
“
These big apes can’t win. I’ll bring back our dead after I’ve killed Tremaines.”
“
You’re endangering the Wand,” the woman pleaded, coming into view. She had cotton-candy-pink hair.
Morgan’s face was
suffused with pain as she clutched a Wand that had begun to smoke. Tris staggered to his feet again, his focus on the Wand.
With half his mind, Kemble slid into the code in the respirator and
rebooted it instantaneously as he connected the hose to Senior’s mouthpiece. Senior looked like a wax figure in the dim light from the Wand. Was Kemble too late?
The light from the Wand winked out. There was a clatter on the floor. Only Jane’s dim column lit the room.
It brightened as she shed light on the hall as well.
“
Damn you!” Morgan yelled. The Wand lay in a pool of blood that boiled and bubbled.
Michael, freed from the assault of the Wand, stumb
led back into the room. He pulled the door shut behind him even as Tris collapsed to the floor.
Michael
slid down the door until he was sitting. His head was bleeding copiously.
Kemble saw, through the security cameras’ eyes, members of the Clan dragging bodies into the foyer from the kitchen as well as from the Bay of Pigs.
They stumbled in the dark and banged into furniture and doorways. Outside Senior’s room, one of the Clan shrugged out of his coat and picked up the Wand with it.
The only sound in
side the room was heaving breath and the mechanical wheeze of the respirator. Jane stood, shaking, in the middle of the room, her tiny glowing column still intact. Kemble had an idea.
“
Give them some light, Jane,” Kemble said. “It will get them out of here faster.”
Jane gave him a surprised
look. Then she got a determined set to her mouth. The security cameras let him see that she had lifted the darkness in the foyer and outside the house. Kemble put his hand around his father’s throat and felt for a pulse in his carotids. He heaved a sigh of relief as Senior’s pulse thrummed erratically back at him.
“
He’s alive,” he whispered to Jane and Michael. “How’s Tris?”
Michael felt for his brot
her’s pulse as well. “Just passed out, I think. That guy could somehow cause pain from a distance.” Tris groaned and his eyelids fluttered.
Through a security camera i
n front of the house, Kemble saw Morgan turn, her face a mask of hatred and anger. “This isn’t the last of me,” she threatened. “Next time you’ll have to stand against all the Talismans.”
Kemble glanced to the views other compartments of his mind were monitoring.
One of the Clan was coming from the van outside with a couple of big plastic jugs. He began sloshing them over the draperies in the living room and the foyer as others loaded their dead comrades into a van parked in front of the house.
Uh
-oh. Gasoline? Some other kind of accelerant?
Morgan’s
rage became an unholy grimace of satisfaction as Clan members began tossing matches at the soaked fabric. The drapes became torches.
The vans pulled away as smoke beg
an to billow in under the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“
They’re gone,” Kemble yelled.
Michael lunged for the door and pulled it open to rolling billows of smoke.
Tris staggered to his feet.
“
Jane, stay with Senior.”
What the hell were they going to do about this fire? The Breakers would be consumed by the time the fire department was notified and got here.
And they couldn’t move Senior. Kemble stumbled out into the foyer. The smoke was punctuated by crackling flames licking up the adobe walls and blackening the wood-beamed ceiling.
“
Michael, get the others from the cellar,” he choked.
But Devin appeared in the doorway, his shirttail over his nose and mouth.
“They’re all safe outside,” he coughed. “Morgan and crew just tore out the front gate.”
“
Place is going up,” Michael said. “Can we move Brian’s machines outside?”
“
No power outside.” Kemble shook his head.
“
I can power them.” Tris, looking exhausted, stumbled back toward the Bay of Pigs.
“
Wait,” Devin called. “I think I’ve got this one. Gonna make a mess, though.”
Kemble realized what his adopted brother was thinking.
“Mess we can clean up. Charred ruins, not so much.”
Devin looked around, his eyes going unfocused.
“Now where’s the water main?” he muttered.
*****
Jane led Brina through the swirling water, ash, and charred remnants of draperies to Brian’s room. The sirens were fading. Two ambulances took Ernie and Mr. Edwards to Torrance Memorial. Miraculously, none of the security staff was dead, though Mr. Edwards probably had a punctured lung. Tris was riding in the third ambulance with Maggie. That was the only way they were going to get Tris to go in and get checked out. He kept fainting, which wasn’t right. The paramedics had alerted the local police to the attack. Kemble was talking to Palos Verde’s finest out in front of the house even now. The family had made a hasty agreement that they would pawn this off as a robbery attempt gone wrong.
“
Will you sit with Brian?” Jane asked her surrogate mother, now mother-in-law, softly.
Brina, usually so in control of the family, looked lost and anxi
ous. “How do we know he’s okay if the monitor is broken?” she worried. “Was he damaged by that lapse in power?”
“
I don’t think so.” Jane tried to sound reassuring, though they wouldn’t know anything until the doctors tried to revive him. And whether his condition was worse than it would have been without that power lapse they’d probably never know. “The respirator is working fine now, and his pulse has steadied.”
They had barricaded Brian’s door against Devin’s flow of water with sheets and blankets, so it was fairly dry.
“How will we ever get this mess cleaned up?” Brina wondered.
“
Kemble will get a mop-up crew in today. I’ll supervise them personally.” Jane knew Brina was feeling as though everything was being taken from her: her husband, her home, her power. She had been violated. They all had. “The Breakers will be as good as new. You’ll see.”
Brian looked
smaller than before being attacked by the Wand. The whoosh of the respirator was regular but hardly reassuring. Breathing shouldn’t sound mechanical. Jane pulled up a chair for Brina. “Just take his hand. He needs you,” she whispered, lowering the older woman into a chair.
Brina nodded convulsively and reached for Brian.
“I’m here, Brian. I’ll always be here.”
Jane heaved a sigh.
When she was sure Brina was settled, she slipped out, waded across the charred foyer into the lightening predawn air of the portico.
“
I’ll come into the station tomorrow and make a full report,” Kemble was promising the grizzled cop, the one who’d come to check out the reports of Jane’s mother disturbing the peace.
“
We’ll both come,” Jane promised, shivering as she slid under Kemble’s arm. She looked up into her husband’s face. It was filled with the same wonder she felt. There’d been no time to even think, let alone say anything to each other, but they both had acquired a power, and they both knew what that meant. Jane knew there was no one else, unless he had formed an attachment to Brian’s pretty doctor. His look said it wasn’t so. He loved her.
And somehow, by some t
rick of fate, she had the gene too. Merlin’s magic ran in her blood and lurked in her bones. Maybe that was the reason she and Drew had become fast friends when they were such different personalities. If only she could have known that about herself all those years when she loved Kemble so hopelessly, it would have made things easier. Or maybe not. Until their unlikely marriage, she’d been just a little girl or his sister’s friend to him.
She couldn’t help her
smile as she looked up into the face of her lover, suffused with the same fragile hope she was feeling.
“
Hey, you two, uh. . . ? I mean, since last week. . . .” The officer cleared his throat.
Had it been only a week? It seemed like a lifetime.
“My wife,” Kemble said, returning her smile with one of his own. “We got married shortly after we saw you last, officer. I’m a lucky guy.”
The officer grinned.
“Yes you are. In spite of a really horrible night.”
That brought them back to reality.
The house was in ruins. Mr. Edwards and Ernie and Maggie were hurt. Maybe Tris, too. Brian was one step away from death and Brina had lost her magic. Maggie and Tris were vulnerable until they could get back to the Breakers. And the Breakers wasn’t the haven it had been. Maybe nowhere was safe anymore.
“
Check in at the station tomorrow afternoon,” the officer said. “In the meantime, try to get some sleep. I’d recommend a hotel. This place is a wreck.”
As
the police car pulled away, Jane and Kemble turned into the house and made their way through the debris. Kemble held her hand, but they were silent. Perhaps neither knew how to broach the subject that loomed between them.
“
Where is everybody?” Kemble said to Lanyon, who was wading out from the kitchen.
“
We’ve set up a command post out on the back deck. Everybody is out there. Tammy made coffee on the gas grill.”
The fire department had okayed the gas being turned back on, but the fire had burned through to the kitchen before Devin doused it
. It smelled like wet charcoal. They’d be cooking in the outdoor kitchen on the terrace until they could get the damage repaired. Whatever would she make for dinner?
They found the remaining family huddled on the deck with the
patio heaters going. It would be light soon, but the early dawn was chilly. Everyone looked exhausted and emotionally drained. Jesse was out like a light in one of the loungers, a blanket tucked around him. Bagheera curled at his feet, and Lance lay, panting, on the flagstones next to him. Michael had his arm around Drew, as Devin did around Kee. Michael had several butterfly bandages over the cut on his head. The paramedics had patched him up when he refused a trip to the E.R.
Tammy handed Lanyon a steaming cup.
“Coffee?” she asked Kemble and Jane.
“
That would be wonderful,” Jane sighed, plopping onto a chaise lounge.
“
I feel so vulnerable here,” Drew muttered shaking her head, probably to chase away her visions. “I’m not even sure why they left. They had us dead to rights. Morgan had the Wand.”
“
She didn’t have enough power to use the Wand in the face of Jane’s darkness and Tris’s heat,” Kemble said thoughtfully. “Otherwise, Michael and Tris would be dead.”
“
We killed a lot of their guys,” Lanyon said. “Devin got two. Michael got three, right?”
“
They won’t stay dead for long,” Kee said glumly.
Jane
sat forward. “What are you saying?”
“
We saw her bring one of her henchmen back to life up at Pendragon’s castle just before she stole the Wand. That’s her power. She can bring the dead to life.”
So t
hey hadn’t made a dent in the Clan’s strength in spite of the toll the night had taken on them. Expressions around the circle echoed her depression.
She felt a big, steadying hand on her shoul
der. “I’ve got the security up. At least they can’t get in again.”
“
How did they get in the first time, then?” Lanyon asked.
Uh-oh. Jane knew what was coming next. She looked up to see Kemble’s expression harden.
He was looking to Michael. Michael just nodded and got up.
“
We’ll be back shortly,” Michael said to Drew. Drew would stop them, Jane was sure.