Secrets of the Guardian (Waldgrave Book 3) (8 page)

Of course, Devin didn’t actually have relatives in South Carolina. Or at least not to his knowledge; his understanding of his biological family was limited to what he knew about his dead grandparents.

Howard sighed. “Well then, you couldn’t drive the car. And I’d want to talk it over with the doctor before you went, because that might not be such a good idea. But I guess I could try to put something together.” He looked directly at Lena.
 
We’ll discuss it later.

After the meal was over, Lena found her way up to Howard’s office and waited patiently until he arrived. When he came in, he went directly to the opposite side of his desk and sat down, looking much more casual than Lena had expected.

Without actually looking at her, he started in a serious tone. “Do you really feel comfortable doing this? Rollin is still out there.”

Lena cast him a nervous glance. “But he hasn’t been heard from in months…not since what he did to Devin, right?”

Howard shrugged. “Right. You know as well as I do.”

Lena shifted uncomfortably. She knew he was still out there, but preferred not to think about it. Everyone knew he was still out there—but what he was doing, or planning to do, remained a frightening enigma. “Are you comfortable with me doing this?”

Howard glanced over at her and sighed. “It’s not about me. You’re old enough to make this call. I think you should take some time to really think about this, and I’ll say I said no if you’re not okay doing it. But if you’re ready to go, I’m ready to let you. But I need to know you can handle being the adult in the situation—Cheryl’s responsible, but she’s still just a kid. And you know I like Devin, but he’s not someone I would leave in charge if given an option.”

Lena nodded. She looked down at her knees. “But you think I’m ready?”

“I think you’re ready if you think you’re ready. It’s a big responsibility, even with taking Cheryl and Devin. You’ll be in charge. I doubt anything will go wrong, but if it does, it would be your job to take care of it.” Howard’s grey eyes scrutinized her.

Lena took a deep breath. She looked back up at Howard. “I’m ready. I can handle this.”

A week later, Lena found herself in a pair of low slung jeans and a T-shirt, casually propping herself against the driver’s door of the grey sedan as Howard worked the last of the heavy suitcases into the trunk. She hadn’t been dressed down to such an extent since her induction into the Council, and while Mrs. Ralston kept eyeing her exposed midriff with deep disapproval, she found that the clothes seemed to enhance the effects of her lifted spirits. For the first time, she was stepping out to attend to her own business, and not anyone else’s. This journey was hers alone.

She was keeping her secrets and her word to Warren Astley. She hadn’t spoken to him since the church in Crystal City, but her present arrangements were sufficiently public that whoever had informed him last time would probably tell him again; she had already booked three nights in a hotel in Missouri. She had laid the plan out very carefully with Devin and Cheryl; they were hoping to meet up with Warren Astley sometime between the extended stay in Missouri and the next extended stay in South Carolina. Hopefully Warren would consent to traveling with them for a while, just so that Devin and Lena could oversee the introduction, and then, if everything went well, Cheryl would be staying with Warren. She would still come out to visit them, but she would be living with her biological father. Lena realized that someday she would likely have to reconcile the facts with Howard, but she was hoping to wait for a time when he didn’t already have so much on his mind.

Of course, Lena hadn’t told either Devin or Cheryl what her business in South Carolina was, despite the fact that Devin badgered her with questions every time they were alone. She had finally sworn him to secrecy and said that she thought she had found some of her own lost relatives in the area. Ones the Council didn’t know about.

Devin’s joking expression slipped. “Which branch of your family tree?”

Lena tried not to let her uncertainty show. She had found another family tree, and it didn’t mesh with the doctor’s story; this one showed that Edward Daray’s grandmother was named Olesia. The doctor was under the impression that Pyrallis’s wife had relatives in South Carolina, but with this new knowledge it was quite possible that Edward had named his daughter after his grandmother. “No one the Council would be concerned about…but still, I don’t want them knowing. This my last retreat, Dev. The last time I am counting on going anywhere that's a secret, and I have a good reason. I don’t want to bring all of this down on some poor unsuspecting people when I don’t even know for sure if I’m related.”

He had agreed to keep the secret, of course; he was too good of a friend not to. And then the day came, and the three of them were getting into the car; Devin took the front passenger seat, and Cheryl crammed herself into the seat behind Lena’s next to the surplus luggage that wouldn’t fit in the trunk and a cooler they were taking along with ice and drinks in it. Lena put her new sunglasses on and waved to Howard as they took off down the unpaved path to the gate at the end of the property. Lena took a deep breath as she crossed the threshold, and then they were off on their own at forty miles an hour.

They blasted the radio for the first four hours just because they could. They had greasy drive-thru food for lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner; the doctor had warned Devin against too much greasy, fatty food, to avoid indigestion for a few weeks, and soon they found themselves pulling over to buy antacids at a little gas station in Kansas. As they pulled back onto the road, Lena felt her cell phone buzz persistently against her right hip. She checked over her shoulder, pulled onto the highway, and then flipped the cell open.

“Lena Collins.”

Static cut through the line, and then cleared. “Lena, it’s Howard. Are you pulled over?”

Lena checked her blind spot before passing a slow moving RV. “Of course I am.”

“Because you know I won’t be happy if you get put on government record in a state that you don’t live in for talking and driving.” His didactic tone made her role her eyes.

She heaved a sigh. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and the only people they encountered were the ones Lena was passing. “Fine!”

She threw the phone into Devin’s lap. He picked it up. “Hi Howard. How are you?...Well, you know, Lena forced a couple of cheeseburgers down my throat and now I’ve got it out both ends…But it’s okay, really. Oh, really?”

The way his voice had picked up at the end caused Lena to look over. Howard wasn’t just checking in.

“Hmm…” Lena saw Devin’s eyes narrow. “That’s awfully convenient. Yeah, glad I’m not the only one.”

“What?” Lena glanced over. “Dev, what is it?”

“Hold please, Lena’s being a control freak,” he covered the phone with his hand and looked over at her, “I believe you're supposed to be concentrating on driving, so why don’t you do that. An old friend of ours dropped Howard an email today.”

Lena furrowed her brow. “Who?”

Devin seemed annoyed that Lena couldn’t guess. “Oh, you know, a certain card-hating, butt-kissing, laundry-inept someone…”

Lena felt her eyes go wide; she was glad she was wearing her shades so that Devin didn’t see. “Griffin? Really? What’d he say?”

Devin raised the cell phone to his ear again. “Yes, now she wants to know what he wants. I’ll tell her.” He turned to Lena. “Apparently he has a bad feeling about you going on this trip, and requests that we turn around now. He says he’s afraid for your safety, given that Rollin hasn’t been caught.”  

Lena grunted. “Figures.”

“What?” Devin had gone back to the cell phone. “Yes. Okay. Thanks, Howard. Yeah, you too. Bye.”

He clapped the phone shut and then made an exaggerated sigh. “We’re still going?”

Lena didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Yes. Why wouldn’t we be?”

“Because he said we should go home…”

Lena checked over her shoulder again and passed a slow moving van. “He’s not my keeper. Not anymore. And he’s freakin’ paranoid…It’s probably that he’s worried about my being out and him not being here,” She made an expression of mock overprotection. “You know, separation anxiety.”

Everyone broke into a hearty laugh. But as Lena went to pass the sedan in front of her, Devin yelled and grabbed the wheel. The semi coming on their left seemed to miss the car by inches, the oversized wheels taller than the grey sedan itself causing panic to leap in Lena’s chest as it rolled on by, horn blaring at her stupidity.

“Take the wheel.”

Lena took a moment to steady herself. Adrenaline pulsed through her; the silence had returned. She looked down and realized that she must have jerked her hands back when Devin had yelled at her, because he was the only person steering the car now. She but her hands back onto the steering wheel and Devin let go. No one spoke.

Several minutes later, Cheryl finally spoke up. “What was that?”

Lena answered slowly. “That was nothing. It was an accident because I let myself get distracted.

“An accident like that, right after you get a phone call like that? Does that seem like a coincidence to you?” Cheryl’s voice had been calm at first, but her pitch had changed, becoming higher. From her window, she’d had a clear view of exactly how close a call it had been, and the experience had left her rattled.

“No…no. It wasn’t a coincidence, and it wasn’t a premonition, Cheryl. It was us getting a phone call that distracted me, and the distraction caused me to do something stupid. Simple cause and effect.” Lena glanced into the rearview mirror.

Cheryl still looked cross. “Lena, there hasn’t been any traffic until you got that call!” She stared into Lena’s eyes in the mirror. “Pull over!”

“I’m not pulling over. We’re fine.”

“Maybe we should pull over,” Devin echoed. Lena glared at him, and he immediately tried to backtrack. “I’m just saying, let’s pull over until everyone’s calm, figure this out, and then we’ll get going again.”

Lena sighed. She wasn’t going to win this one; Cheryl looked on the verge of tears. She flicked the blinker and pulled the car off the side of the road. It rolled to a halt and Lena put it in park. She looked over at Devin, who seemed to be deep in thought and somewhat troubled.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Dev…”

“Shh…” The sound barely escaped his lips and they all sat together in silence for several long minutes before he spoke again. “Lena, does this feel right to you?”

She must have looked at him like he was crazy, but he gave no indication that he cared. Did it feel right to her? What was that supposed to mean? Her heart rate was finally sinking back to normal, but she still felt the buzz from their close brush with the semi. It might have been the sweat drying on her arms, but the car suddenly felt positively chill.

She reached forward and turned the heat on, flashing Devin a smile. “I feel fine…why?”

“He’s a full Silenti, and from what I understand, he’s one of the best.” Devin avoided her gaze. “Don’t you think we should consider…?”

“No,” Lena said simply, “I don’t. Devin, he’s across the country. He doesn’t know. You’re getting yourselves worked up over nothing!”

Her words died in the cool air. The sun was starting to go down, and they still had fifty miles to their first intended stop. She wasn’t turning around; Cheryl still looked worried and skeptical. Devin was trying to send her private glances, questioning how sure she really was.

“Look,” Lena started, “maybe you’re right. Maybe he…I don’t know, maybe he somehow foresaw the semi or something. From this distance, personally, I’ve never known him to be
 
that
 good, but maybe he did. I still think it was self-fulfilling, because we probably would have blamed it on whatever the first thing to go wrong was, even if the semi hadn’t been there. I’m not ready to turn around yet, and it’s a shorter distance to the next hotel than to go back to the last town. I’ll call him tonight if it’ll make you feel better.”

It was a bold faced lie that the last town was further than the next one, but neither Devin nor Cheryl seemed to have been keeping track. They looked cautiously from Lena to each other.

“Does that sound okay?” Lena prompted as calmly as she could.

She gazed down at the steering wheel.

From the backseat, she finally heard Cheryl’s whispering voice. “Sure.”

Lena turned the ignition and they got back onto the highway. There was some small talk, but they mostly kept to themselves after that point. When they finally arrived at the next town and found a motel, Cheryl was positively pale.

They grabbed the bags they needed and moved into their room. Lena and Cheryl would be sharing one bed, and Devin was taking the other. Cheryl was so exhausted from worrying that she fell asleep almost immediately. After they had finished moving the bags inside, Devin pulled her outside the room to talk.

“She’s really freaked out.” He said, shaking his head.

“I’ve noticed, Devin, thank you.” Lena glared at him. “And I don’t get what the big deal is. Just because Griffin tells us to turn around, you’re that ready to do it?”

“It’s not just that, Lena, it’s the fact that it’s
 
him
. Look, maybe you haven’t noticed, but full-blooded Silenti tend to be 
right
 about these things. I don’t have that ability, and I don’t know if you have that ability or not. But you know what? I’ve known for a while that Cheryl 
does
 have that ability, at least a little, and she’s worried. The fact that she’s worried, and he’s worried, worries me.”