The morning sun soaked her pale skin.
How did I end up here?
she wondered, basking in the tropical rays, knowing that a long day stuck in the quarantine ward awaited her after breakfast. As an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she felt the many years she had spent in the bowels of laboratories were now mounting on her tired shoulders. The CDC had never before placed her in charge of an investigation. She had only tagged along as an assistant before this case. As she started to panic over the responsibility, a single face washed over her thoughts: her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alexandra.
Her Blackberry smart phone buzzed inside her leather handbag. As she plunged her hand inside the morass of notepads, napkins, and empty pens, she hoped that her daughter was calling. She realized suddenly that she had not spoken to her only child since the prior evening, when her daughter had dropped her at the Atlanta airport to travel to Miami.
If anything was wrong, Alexandra would call
, Angela convinced herself, guilt panging in her chest.
A text message waited. Angela read the words breathlessly:
All okay here. Love ya.
Angela rang her daughter's cell phone immediately: five rings, but no answer. Her daughter's sweet voice echoed through the receiver, asking her to leave a message.
“Hey babe,” Angela said, smiling and staring across the street at the ocean. “Got your text. You didn't call me last night.” She paused and bit her lip. “I didn't call you either.” Another bite, harder than the first. “You wouldn't believe what's going on here. Call me, if I don't call you again first. Love you.”
Angela hit the end button on her Blackberry and sank restlessly back against the metal café chair. An ambulance with a wailing siren and flashing red lights sped past her in the direction of the hospital.
Restless to hear from her daughter, Angela started to dial the cell phone number again but stopped before hitting the send button.
She's seventeen
, she told herself,
and she can probably take care of herself.
Shoving the phone back in her leather handbag, she glanced up at the tattoo parlor next to the café. A tall, bald man in faded jeans and a black sleeveless shirt stood at the front with a set of keys in the lock. He nodded at her as he opened the door. She shied her eyes away and read the name above the entrance: Devil's Tongue Tattoo.
Burying her face in the newspaper that she had laid out on the table, Angela tried to ignore the man as he emerged from the tattoo parlor and walked confidently toward her. His smile broadened across his tan, chiseled face. His deep-brown eyes twinkled at the woman who was still trying to ignore him.
Leaning over a low, black iron railing, he handed Angela a black business card. A red eye winked at her from the front of the card as she accepted itâdespite an inner voice that told her to ignore the stranger.
“We're open all day,” he told her, “and most of the night.” He turned back toward his store. “Beautiful women get a ten percent discount.” He winked at Angela over his broad shoulder.
A light ocean breeze ruffled the pages of the newspaper as Angela tried to concentrate on the headlines, fighting the urge to wander into the tattoo parlor. “Miami misses strike from Hurricane Emily,” she read aloud from the bottom of the first page. “Storm heads up Atlantic seaboard toward the South Carolina coast.
“Peyton Manor is there,” Angela mumbled to herself. In her mind's eye, she saw an image of the grand house, nestled in a bay on a barrier island south of Charleston, South Carolina. That is where June, her ex-husband's mother, lived. She and June did not talk much. Yet her stomach churned to think June was in the path of the storm.
Surely June would call if she needed help because of the oncoming storm
, she thought to herself and bit her lip again, until this time it bled.
Sighing deeply, Angela focused her eyes on the story placed next to the weather report. “Mysterious outbreak plagues plastic housewives,” Angela read aloud and scanned down the rest of the story.
Doctors and scientists gathering on the quarantine ward of a south Miami Beach medical center are shaking their heads at the reason for the outbreak that has brought them to Miami. The patients share a common link: recent plastic surgery. The primary symptoms of the outbreak's victims is the occurrence of a dark, tattoo-like mark on the victims' backs that resembles “a pair of wings,” according to a source within the walls of the medical center. Other symptoms include increasingly volatile episodes of diarrhea, a fever, and a skin rash that culminates in leather-like scales on the upper layer of skin.
Angela finished reading the blurb and shoved the paper aside with acute disdain for the reporter's lack of scientific expertise.
This will only frighten people needlessly
, she thought to herself as a name suddenly popped into her head. Jim Woodward, the father of Alexandra's best friend Taylor, was a highly successful plastic surgeon back home in Atlanta.
As Angela retrieved her Blackberry from her handbag, she remembered a class she had survived as a humble undergraduate at Emory University. That class had pointed her down the road she now traveled as an epidemiologist for the CDC. Her first day in the class, “Rare Diseases of the Amazon Basin,” was with Dr. Hans Frederick VonHessen. She hid in the last seat of the last row of the auditorium. By the second time in this class, she took a seat in the front row and never looked back at her previous desire to major in film with a minor in English. At one point midway through the semester, Dr. VonHessen assigned an article about a plant in the Amazon whose ingestion made people break out in a scaly rash and develop marks upon their backs that resembled tattooed wings. The plant was named the
Raiz do Dragao
, the dragon root, Angela recalled from the cobwebs in her mind.
Her Blackberry rested in her palm. Searching her contact list, she found Jim Woodward.
I hope it's not too early
, she thought, looking at her watch. She did not know that the doctor was usually in his office by nine every morning to escape the nagging of his young, demanding second wife.
“Hello?” a deep voice with the distinct accent of the Texas plains answered promptly after two rings.
“Howdy, stranger,” Angela greeted him. “I hope it's not too early to call you.”
“It's never too early for Angela Peyton to call me,” he said, cutting her apology off before she could finish. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Jim, I'm in Miami,” Angela confessed.
“No kidding,” he said. “I'm down here, too. Where are you?”
Angela glanced across the street and again at the Devil's Tongue. “The CDC sent me here on short notice. There's some sort of outbreak among women who have had plastic surgery recently.”
“You don't say,” Jim Woodward drawled as he sipped stiff, black coffee from a Styrofoam cup in the lobby of his hotel. A blueberry Danish tempted him and he wrapped the secret treat in a napkin to enjoy later in the conference room upstairs. “I flew in early this morning. The flight had to wait until the storms passed over the airport in Atlanta last night.”
Angela tensed, remembering that she had not received a call from her daughter. “I guess I just missed it then. My flight was at seven last night. What are you doing here, Jim? This is quite a coincidence.”
A lock of sandy blond hair fell into the man's face as he stepped outside the hotel lobby to the veranda surrounding the sparkling blue pool. Shoving the hair behind his ear, he whispered into the phone, “Don't tell Krystal. I told her I had to fly down here for a foot fungus conference. But I'm really here to learn about new liposuction procedures.”
“I won't tell,” Angela whispered back into the phone sympathetically. She loathed Jim's extremely high-maintenance wife.
“Okay then,” Jim sighed. “So what's going on with you, Angela? I haven't seen you in a while.” He sat down on a plastic chair and picked at the blueberry Danish.
“I need a favor,” Angela said. “The case I'm working on down here, it involves women who have had plastic surgery. I could just send you an e-mail,” she said, blushing.
“Nonsense,” he said, swallowing the last of the forbidden pastry. “Let's get together for dinner tonight. Do you think you could get away for a little while?”
“I will for you,” she said eagerly.
“Then it's a date,” Jim said, rising to his feet and brushing crumbs from his khaki slacks. “Call me around seven.”
“Okay,” Angela said, twirling her auburn hair around her finger as she spoke.
“Hey Angela,” he said before ending the call, “did you hear that our girls don't have school today?”
“What?” Angela stammered.
“The storm last night in Atlanta knocked out the power on campus. Apparently those grand magnolia trees our tuition money pays to keep up around campus toppled over and knocked out power lines and windows.”
“How do you know?” Angela asked, wincing. Alexandra still had not called her back.
“Taylor called with an update this morning. She wanted me to know in case I checked her Facebook page and saw the pictures she plans to upload of her lounging by the pool today.”
“What a mess,” Angela remarked and then lied, “Alexandra called me about it this morning, too.”
“So I'll see you tonight then, Angela? I'm looking forward to it already.”
Angela licked her battered lips and told herself not to bite them again. “Yes,” she said and hit the end button on her cell phone. Immediately she found her daughter's number on the phone and tried calling again. “Pick up,” she said aloud, anger and fear rising in her chest.
Five rings later, a weak voice answered, “Hello?”
“Sleeping in?” Angela asked angrily.
“Hi Mom,” Alexandra said. “I guess you heard school was cancelled. That storm was pretty bad last night.”
“Are you okay?” Angela asked, rising to her tired feet.
“Yeah,” Alexandra promised. “I'm just tired.”
“Well, go back to bed,” Angela said softly, as she paced back and forth.
“Okay,” Alexandra agreed, as the sound of an ambulance siren screeched into her ear through the receiver.
“Call me later,” Angela asked once the siren passed. But only a dead connection rang in her ear. Shaking the phone, she scowled and huffed toward the curb to hail a taxi back to the hospital.
Meanwhile, Alexandra was really in her Jeep, resting her head back against the passenger's seat. She sighed and glanced over at Kraven, who was sitting quietly next to her. She stroked the back of his hand, which tensely gripped the steering wheel.
“Relax,” she said, shoving her cell phone in her skirt pocket. “Please take me home, and we'll figure out how to tell her later.”
Kraven kept his blue eyes locked on the windshield, but Alexandra detected a deep gulp in his throat.
He burns like fire
, she thought.
Alexandra snapped her fingers back, instinctively checking the tips of her fingers to see if they had been singed. She did not want to damage the powers she was just learning to harness from her fingertips. She blew at them softly and held her hands out the rolled-down window.
The Jeep crept through the heavy morning traffic. Kraven snaked through the snarled downtown Atlanta avenues and side streets toward Park View Tower, where Alexandra's tenth-floor apartment was located.
“It would be easier if we could just fly home,” she sighed.
“We will later,” said Kraven solemnly and she was beginning to sense that he did not break a promise.
The headmaster of Collinsworth had already suspected trouble would be waiting for him on campus as he eased from the interstate to the side streets of South Atlanta before the break of dawn. Holding his breath, he barreled full speed ahead through the blinking red traffic lights.
Behind the steering wheel of his champagne-colored Jaguar, Dr. Humphrey Sullivan wiped at the beads of sweat pooling above his top lip. “Cursed heat,” he muttered, jabbing a finger at a vent on his dashboard. He remembered that the cocky young mechanic at the Jaguar dealership had quoted him two thousand dollars to fix the car's broken air-conditioning system.
“For what I paid for this heap,” he vehemently exclaimed, “there should be ladies waving palm leaves at me from the back seat!” The round, balding headmaster complained violently as he eased his car onto Tangle Wood Lane, a steaming cup of dark roast coffee tucked into the cup holder by his thigh.
Twisting the Jaguar past a mangled stop sign toppled sideways in the street, Dr. Sullivan gasped. Along the length of the road, fallen magnolia trees lay scattered, uprooted by a severe thunderstorm. So this is what the storm looked like that had kept the headmaster up all night, praying his leaking roof did not collapse on his newly refurbished granite and stainless steel kitchen.
The Jaguar purred slowly, winding carefully past the fallen trees toward the iron-gated entrance of Collinsworth Academy. “The lady has fallen,” he whispered to himself as he approached the end of the lane. The gate, bent and crushed, swung creakily on its hinges while it held up a fallen magnolia tree nicknamed Miss Daisy. For generations, graduating students ritually heralded the finale of their years at Collinsworh by draping the grand and ancient tree with toilet paper.
“Now how am I supposed to get in there?” the headmaster blasted at the tree blocking the driveway into the school.
The wet rubber soles of his leather Gucci loafers slipped on the brake pedal as he stared in disbelief at the mountain of bark and leaves, making the Jaguar lunge forward. In his ears, a loud pop broke the silence of the sleepy lane.
“This morning gets better and better,” the headmaster shouted as he climbed out of the car to inspect his punctured front tire. The spiked end of a tree limb torn from the trunk of the fallen magnolia had stuck deep inside the rubber, and the driver's side of the car already sagged as hot air oozed from the brand-new Pirelli wheel.