Chains of Fire (39 page)

“Really?” Samuel sounded more than interested. He sounded . . . aroused, and his gaze lingered on her catsuit. “I can’t wait to see.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said.

“And appropriate for your gift. Isn’t the symmetry of the universe amazing?” Charisma sounded as pleased as if she’d directed matters herself.

Samuel got a funny expression on his face. “Isabelle, your mother is going to be mortified that everyone thinks her daughter got tattoos.”

Isabelle smiled smugly. “I thought of that.”

“She’ll blame me,” Samuel added.

“I thought of that, too.”

They laughed together.

As if some anxiety tugged at him, Aleksandr glanced out the window at the New York streets, then interrupted their amusement. “You got what was promised to you, then, Isabelle. What about you, Samuel?”

“I saved her,” Samuel said simply. “That’s enough for me.”

“But we all hope that’s a onetime thing,” Aleksandr said. “So the prophecy didn’t work for
you?”

Isabelle looked sharply at the young man. He seemed almost pleased at the idea.

“There’s more,” Samuel admitted. “I developed my gift, the mind-control thing, in my teens, and it’s pretty powerful. But I’ve never been able to communicate with my thoughts.” He rubbed the back of his neck as if it ached. “Yet now, I can.”

“Early this morning, I heard your voice call me to help Isabelle,” Jacqueline said. “And instinctively, I knew what to do.”

“I heard you, too,” Genny said. “You called me to give back. And I did.”

“Now I know that if I open myself to another mind, we can communicate.” He sent his thought to Isabelle.
Can’t we?

She jumped. She stared at him.
Yes
?

He relaxed against the seat. “It’s as easy as falling off a log.”

“Wow.” Isabelle rubbed her head. “That was weird.”

“But not painful or anything, right?” Samuel asked.

“Just weird,” she assured him.

“Okay, so you’re talking to Isabelle,” Aleksandr said impatiently. “But you guys are in love, so that probably gives you a connection. Can you talk to anyone else?”

“Yes,” Samuel said. “Dina.”

The name dropped like fragile glass into their midst, and exploded.

“You can communicate with Dina?” All John’s attention was fixed on Samuel. “How do you know that?”

Samuel flashed him an annoyed glance.

“Okay, that was stupid,” John admitted. “She’s a mind speaker and she can communicate with you. Are you sure you can send back to her?”

“I can and I do, because she has answered me. Not recently. Since she left, she’s been blocking me. But she’s out there somewhere.”

“She’s alive?” Jacqueline asked.

“Oh, yes.” Samuel was sure of that. “More interesting, in my opinion, is that it’s a new development for her, too, to be able to hear someone’s thoughts.”

Charisma went, “Ooh,” so she understood.

Rosamund said, “So you’re saying that what has occurred with Dina is related to the Mayan prophecy that I translated, but I didn’t translate the whole thing, because I broke the stone tablet over the bad guy’s head—”

“I totally approved,” Aaron said, “since the bad guy had been trying to kill me.”

“Seemed a waste of a good stone tablet,” Samuel said.

Aaron shot him an obscene gesture.

“The prophecy I read concerns only the Chosen, or so I thought,” Rosamund said. “Intriguing. Is Dina one of the Chosen, or are the Others somehow part of the prophecy?”

“All seven Chosen must succeed before the next cycle of the Chosen or we lose our gifts and the Others are triumphant, able to wreak their havoc unopposed. Think of it! In less than three years, five of us have found true love and enhanced our gifts.” Charisma bumped Aleksandr’s arm. “We’ve got a little more than four years to get our kudos. Think we can do it?”

“Sure.” But he didn’t meet her gaze, didn’t meet anyone’s gaze, and he returned to the subject that held a firm grip on his attention. “Samuel, what about your mark? Did you get one?”

“I’ve always had one. Marks on my scalp that looked like fingerprints. My fingerprints.” Samuel put his hand to the back of his head. He gave a tug. Just as it had in his adolescence when he received his mark, his dark hair came out in handfuls.

Isabelle gasped.

Aaron said, “Whoa, man.”

McKenna glanced in the mirror. “Good heavens!” he said.

Samuel turned his head and showed them the bare places that extended from the previous marks—the fingerprints—down to the back of his neck. “It’s no longer merely my fingerprints, right? It’s the whole palm print now. My palm print?” He held up his hand so they could compare.

“That’s it.” Rosamund sounded as if she couldn’t wait to research his mark.

“That is awesome,” Aleksandr said.

Isabelle lightly touched Samuel’s bare scalp. “After we give our report to Irving, I’ll take you upstairs and shave the rest of your head. I love your hair”—she stroked his head—“but I want to fully see your mark. I’m sure it’s magnificent!”

In a falsetto voice, Caleb crooned, “Oh, Samuel. You’re so strong and brave.”

Jacqueline jabbed her elbow in his gut.

Caleb doubled over.

“Pussy. Whipped,” Samuel said to him.

“It’s catching.” Caleb recovered so suddenly, Jacqueline couldn’t escape when he grabbed at her.

She snickered while he kissed her.

“You are not getting horizontal on my lap,” John said sternly. “So knock it off.”

Caleb and Jacqueline sat up, still smiling.

“My interest is still piqued by that building and the mural and the feathers,” Rosamund said.

“Of course it is, honey.” Aaron put his arm around her shoulders and grinned at her in delight.

“No, listen. It’s the building, the mural, the story, the feathers.” She waved her hands at them. “Don’t you see?”

“No,” Samuel said baldly. He never understood half of Rosamund’s babbling.

“Come on, Samuel. You’re being simpleminded. It’s the prophecy.
My
prophecy.” Jacqueline smiled triumphantly.

“The prophecy. Of course!” Caleb quoted,
“‘Some must find that which is lost forever. For rising on the ashes of the Gypsy Travel Agency is a new power in a new building. Unless—’”

Jacqueline’s voice joined his.

“‘Unless this hope takes wing’”—
they both emphasized
“wing”
—
“‘this power and this building will grow to reach the stars, and cast its shadow over the whole earth, and evil will rule.”

“See? When you put the pieces together, it’s easy,” Rosamund said.

“I don’t think it’s exactly easy.” John was a stickler for detail. “We don’t know the location of the second feather, and the first one is entombed in concrete under that building.”

“The concrete has not contained the feather Osgood entombed beneath the building,” Charisma said. “It’s working its way down through the concrete to the earth.”

Samuel remembered the way Charisma had been feeling up the marble columns. Now he knew why. And he took the next logical leap. “But you’re wrong, John. We
do
know where both feathers are, and that’s a start.”

Isabelle followed his thought and looked at him, wide-eyed, startled, worshipful. “Of course. That’s brilliant. The second feather. That’s what’s in the Swiss safety-deposit box!”

“Mr. Shea, Martha, Dina, and I are assistants to the Chosen Ones and their mates,” McKenna sternly rebuked and, at the same time, reassured. “If it is time, then you do what you must.”

“It’s time,”
Aleksandr repeated.

Charisma quieted, observed the youth she had known for almost three years, trying to see what was different about him. She hadn’t been paying attention, but now that she was, he felt . . . older, the last vestiges of his youth vanquished by . . . by anxiety. Or resentment. Or emotions she had never imagined this open-faced, pleasant, well-balanced guy could experience.

“All right,” she said uncertainly. She rolled her bracelets up and down her arms, trying to read her stones, to catch some hint of the discontent that plagued him. “We can always do it again later when everybody’s with us.”

She put one hand in Aleksandr’s, another in Samuel’s. Samuel took Rosamund’s. Rosamund took Aaron’s. And so on around the line until the Chosen and their mates were linked.

John lifted his hands, and Genny’s and Jacqueline’s at the same time. “Here’s to you two. We are so glad you’ve come together at last.”

Hands tightened.

Warm, bright, and hot, a sizzle of lightning rippled through the circle, lighting their nerves, their minds, their hearts.

The sensation was, as always, the proof they sought that all things had transpired as they should.

Everyone irresistibly laughed.

“Approval from above!” Aaron turned to Rosamund and kissed her.

John kissed Genny.

Caleb kissed Jacqueline.

Samuel kissed Isabelle. And kissed her. And kissed her.

Aleksandr looked at Charisma. He didn’t reach for her to share a kiss; he merely shrugged.

So she shrugged in return.

Samuel and Isabelle were still crushed in each other’s arms, and it was getting pretty intense.

“Hey, you two.” Charisma jostled them.

Samuel cradled Isabelle to his chest. “When we get back to the mansion, I don’t care what kind of crisis occurs. I don’t care if Jacqueline predicts the Cubs will win the pennant. I don’t care if Davidov decides to hold a Tupperware party and invite every vampire and elf he knows. I’m taking this woman upstairs and we’re going to have sex. Not in the window seat. Not in a tent. Not on a desk. In a
bed
!”

The Chosen Ones laughed.

Looking into Isabelle’s eyes, he said, “I would rather be miserable with you than happy without you—but we can do better than that.”

“I love you,” she said. “I saw you today in Osgood’s office while he dangled your deepest desires before you, and now I know . . . I can trust you. With my heart, with my soul, with my life. You make me laugh, you make me cry, but always, always you have loved me.”

“This time it will be happily ever after,” Samuel vowed.

Charisma had never seen anything so sweet as Isabelle dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief—leave it to Isabelle to have a handkerchief stashed in a catsuit—while Samuel smiled all doofy at her.

Digging an elbow into his side, she murmured, “You bought her jewelry.”

He glared at her meaningfully. “I will give it to her later. When we’re
alone
.”

“Ah, you guys.” Charisma dug her elbow into his side again. “You make me believe in fairy tales.”

“Yeah. Fairy tales.” Aleksandr slapped the back of McKenna’s seat. “Hey, wait! Pull over! I’ve got an appointment at the courthouse.”

“What kind of appointment?” Aaron asked.

“I’m going to get married.” He glanced at his watch. “And I’m late!”

Everyone in the car laughed.

Everyone except him . . . and Charisma.

Opening the door, he jumped in the direction of the curb.

Charisma turned and watched as he hurried toward the courthouse, toward a girl standing at the top of the stairs by the pillars, her blond hair blowing in the breeze, a welcoming smile on her face.

She was gorgeous.

Again Charisma ran her bracelets up and down her arm.

She didn’t understand why, or even how, but her feel for Aleksandr was changing, twisting, fading. She couldn’t reach him through the stones; she couldn’t hear the earth sing his name.

She faced forward.

In all of her senses, the Aleksandr Wilder she had known faded from existence.