John nodded. “I told my wife she should let Rafe try, that perhaps he needed the control of the Soul Circle to manage his abilities, to keep this from happening again. Maybe I should have argued harder, but she understands my children’s gifts far better than I do.”
“Her father was a Hunter like Rafe,” Tessa added. “My dad figured she knew what she was doing.”
John gave his daughter a look of mild annoyance. “It’s sometimes irritating to have a child who can read your thoughts.”
“Apparently not all of them, or I would have honed in on the secrets you and Mom were keeping.”
John blanched. Tessa put her hand to her mouth, regret flickering in her eyes.
“I bet that was fun during the teenage years,” Cara said, trying to lighten the mood.
John tried to smile. “Completely took away the intimidation factor.” He looked back at his daughter. “I’m so sorry we kept things from you, kitten. We were only trying to protect you.”
“Oh, Daddy. I know you meant well.” Tessa got up and hugged him. “And you
can
be very intimidating, especially when you really are angry. You only have trouble when you’re bluffing.”
Cara’s heart turned over at the easy affection between father and daughter. She’d had a taste of that with Donald, Danny’s father, but it had been taken away far too quickly. Far too abruptly.
She got to her feet. Her emotions were running close to the surface today. Nearly dying obviously did that to a person. “Thank you for dinner,” she said, “but I should get to bed. It’s been a
really
long day.”
“Of course.” John stood, his arm slipping around Tessa’s waist. “Do you remember the way? Tessa can show you.”
“No, I’m fine. If you see Rafe, just let him know I went up.”
“Sure thing,” John replied. “See you in the morning.”
“Don’t worry, Cara.” Tessa’s face took on a faraway expression, and for a moment it seemed as if her eyes glowed. “Everything will work out for the best. The final battle is coming, and all will be resolved. For better or worse.” Her eyes closed, and she sagged in her father’s arms.
Cara took a step forward. “Is she okay?”
“Just a prediction. Happens all the time.” John watched as Tessa’s eyes fluttered open. “Good morning.”
“Wow.” Tessa straightened, putting a hand to her temple. “That was a doozy.”
“Are you all right?” Cara asked.
“Fine. It happens.” Tessa gave a tight smile. “But maybe I’ll go meditate for a while.”
“I’ll walk you there,” her father said.
“Thanks. I don’t want to end up passed out in the yuccas again. Good night, Cara. Sleep well.” She headed out of the dining room, her father beside her with his arm around her shoulders.
Cara watched them go, humbled by their love for each other. Maybe even envious. And more determined than ever that Rafe mend the rift with his family, before it was too late.
* * *
Rafe followed his mother to the staircase leading up to the third floor. She ascended ahead of him, her feet quick and sure. He followed more slowly. Memories assaulted him as he took hold of the smooth oak banister and began to climb, images from childhood and from the last time he had ascended these stairs. Tonight elegant light fixtures lit the way, but that day—that terrible, awful day—bright sunlight had streamed through the windows that stretched up toward the cathedral ceiling, false brightness illuminating a house heavy with grief. His stride faltered. A man had died that day, and Darius nearly so.
His fault. All his fault.
He struggled to breathe as he made himself continue to the top of the stairs, not from exertion but from the sheer bombardment of emotion that swamped him. All these years, he’d thought he was handling it. All this time, he’d thought he’d moved on. But the pressure in his chest and the lump in his throat told him he’d been fooling himself. The wound was as fresh today as it had been five years ago—perhaps more so from the thick scar tissue that had formed over it, and made worse by his parents’ deception.
By the time he got to the third floor, it was all he could do to keep walking forward. His instincts screamed at him to go back the way he’d come, to get Cara and leave. What had he been thinking, coming back here? What had made him think he could be here, even for a minute, and have it be okay?
But he knew he had to do this. Had to keep going, to make things right again. It was past time, and he wasn’t a kid anymore.
He paused outside the door to the
tenplu
. Beyond the portal lay his family’s most sacred place, the consecrated circle where they all performed their energy rituals. He knew the layout by heart. As soon as he stepped through the door, the circle would stretch before him, five, maybe six feet from the door. To his left, an alarmed door that led to the rooftop garden where they grew flowers and herbs and recharged their focus stones beneath the blessed sunlight. And straight ahead, beyond the boundaries of the circle, was the vault.
He hadn’t been allowed in the vault when he’d lived at home; he would have only been welcome there when he completed his Soul Circle at twenty-four. Since he’d left home at twenty-three, that day had never come. Frankly, after all that had happened, he was surprised his mother had summoned him to this place. He would have expected her to keep him far away from his family’s treasures.
Gathering his courage, he opened the door and walked into the room, then stopped. When had they moved so much greenery into the
tenplu
? Planters ringed three of the four walls, all of them full of flowers bursting with color. His mother stood at a planter right near the door to the greenhouse, watering her favorite birds of paradise: tall, orange flowers that resembled open-beaked birds because of the way the sharp petals bloomed.
Nostalgia gripped him by the throat. How many times had he seen her like this, puttering around the garden?
“Give me a minute,” she said. “My babies were thirsty.”
He nodded, unable to speak. What was he doing here, mere feet from the sacred place where he’d thought he would someday complete his Soul Circle? He wanted to leave, but he knew he would find no solutions that way. He had to stay here and confront what he had done—as did she. Only then did they have a chance at mending this horrible rift.
At least, that was what Cara believed.
Part of him doubted it could be done. There had been too much hurt on both sides. Surely the best thing was to stay apart. He actually took a step backward, and she jerked her gaze up to his, her eyes narrowing.
“Don’t you even think of moving another step, Rafael Jude Montana.”
He froze, the use of his full name as effective now as it had been when he was ten and had sneaked a lizard into Tessa’s room. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“That, young man, is not your decision.” She plunked down her watering can—pink with butterflies—and yanked at the chain around her neck, tugging a familiar pendant from beneath her pale blue shirt. The chain glittered reddish gold even in the artificial light, the setting ancient, the large crystal clear and deftly faceted as it settled against her chest. “I am the
apaiz nagusi
; I am in charge in this place.”
He nodded his head. “Yes, Mama.”
She came toward him. “Have you forgotten our ways already?”
“Of course not. But I have questions.”
“About the stone.”
“About the stone. About Seers. About Atlantis.” He barely got the last word past his lips.
“Yes.” His mother sighed and glanced down for a moment before meeting his gaze again. “I have something to show you.” She turned and walked through the circle of the
tenplu,
her focus stone glowing softly as she passed each of the markers that denoted the chakras. Halfway through the circle she stopped and looked back. “Are you coming?”
He wanted to refuse, uncertain of his welcome. No matter his mother’s affection for him, the circle would not accept the unworthy, even if he was the son of the current priestess. That alone would assure the power contained therein would not kill him, but it could knock him unconscious for several hours. Still there was no defying his mother, not when she had that determined set to her mouth. Bracing himself, he stepped into the circle.
His crystal heated against his skin—not a searing, get-thee-from-my-presence burn but the slow glow of an old friendship rekindled. He let out a measured breath. She gave a short nod and led the way through the circle to the other side of the room.
His heart pounded as he followed, and he didn’t take a substantial breath until he crossed the boundary on the other side unscathed. With a look that clearly commanded him to follow, his mother led the way to the steel door in the middle of the wall—the vault.
He had never been this close before. The reinforced portal had a hand plate next to it and some kind of peephole. She laid her hand on the plate, then leaned in to look through the peephole. A pale blue light shimmered across her eye, and small LED lights on both panels went from red to green. The locks on the door snicked open.
High-tech biometrics. Probably one of Dad’s gadgets. As his mother pushed open the heavy door, he glanced down and saw an identical eye scanner and hand plate lower down, about four feet from the floor.
Wheelchair height.
“For your brother,” his mother confirmed. “Of course he doesn’t use it as much now, not since he started walking again.”
“Yeah.” He tried to swallow past that damned lump in his throat again. “How long has he been out of the chair?”
“About nine months or so. He never gave up, always swore he would walk again. He spent a lot of time meditating, working with healing energy.” Her lips curved. “That stubbornness of his came in handy this time.”
He just nodded, his vocal cords unresponsive, as his mother stepped into the vault and flicked on a light.
He almost expected laser beams or a three-headed dog to come after him as he crossed the threshold. But nothing happened. She went to one of the many long, slender drawers lining the walls of the vault and opened it.
“This is what I wanted to show you.” She moved aside so he could see inside the drawer. Lined side-by-side on black mountings were clear blocks of some kind of glass, and preserved within each block were documents—ancient sheets of some kind of curling parchment yellowed with age. “This is our history, Rafe—all that is left of it, anyway. And here is the one about the Stones of Ekhia.”
The document illustrated three pyramid-shaped stones being set into some kind of triangular frame. Another sketch showed hands hovering over the stones, and in a third, the stones seemed to change, become clear, with power streaking from one to the other like a ricochet, meeting in the middle, then shooting skyward. Descriptions accompanied each picture, though he could not understand the strange alphabet to read them.
But a symbol in the corner of the parchment caught his eye. Three triangles connected by a circle with a wavy line in the middle. The same design as Adrian Gray’s tattoo.
“What does it mean?” he whispered, uncertain whether his hushed tones were due to reverence or emotional overload.
“Much of our written language has been lost over the ages,” she said, regarding the parchment as if she could will its secrets to reveal. “My grandmother’s mother used to speak of a great wrong done to the Seers, a wrong that resulted in the destruction of our perfect utopia and the theft of our heritage.”
“What wrong? By whom?”
“Someone who wanted the power of the Seers.” Her lips curved in a sad smile. “Of course we cannot give our powers to anyone; it is not our choice. But the legend goes that this evil being—some say he was of Atlantis and others say he was a foreigner—tried to seize the key to the power of the Seers by force and the backlash of its misuse destroyed the city.”
“The key being the Stones of Ekhia?”
“So legend has it.”
“The thing about legends is that they become enhanced over time.” He eyed the parchment again. “For all we know, this could be a picture of the pyramids of Egypt.”
“I don’t think so.” She closed the drawer and moved to a cabinet hanging on the wall in the middle of the vault.
“Why? Because of the stuff you never told us? About the other Atlanteans?”
She paused with her hand on the handle of the cabinet, her back to him, her shoulders tense. “From what I was told by my grandparents, the people hunting Seers have something to do with the one who destroyed Atlantis. That’s all I know.” She shook her head and opened one of the cabinet doors. “I prefer not to think of that time. We have been safe all these years, but those men murdered my mother.”
“I thought your mother died in a fire.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Who do you think set the fire?”
He hadn’t put the pieces together. With one simple question, she cast a new light on a childhood story. He’d always known his grandmother had died in a house fire. But knowing that the fire had been deliberately set by a group of people who wanted to exterminate Seers gave the old tale a sinister twist.
“I want you to see this,” she said, opening the other cabinet door so that the entire contents were revealed. “It was the last relic our ancestor saved as Atlantis was sinking into the ocean.”
He’d expected shelves or more documents. Instead the shallow cabinet functioned more as a showcase, lined with royal blue and covered in more of the glass. Shining brightly against the lining was a triangle of the same reddish-gold metal as the chain around his neck—orichalcum. The thing had to be over a foot long, solid throughout, and in each corner of the triangle were indentations of a smaller triangle about the size of a woman’s palm, as if something was supposed to be fitted there.
“What is that thing?” he whispered.
“Legend says this was a frame for the Stones of Ekhia.” She shrugged. “But as you said, legends become distorted over time. Before today I’d assumed the stones were another myth. But somehow our ancestors used this frame and the stones to communicate with the Creators. And now someone else wants that power.”
“You should have told us.”