The Lost (6 page)

The car’s engine purred softly with the acceleration as Tony switched lanes.

“Sounds sweet,” she said, aware of how much time and effort her brothers had put into restoring the classic muscle car.

“See, that just proves my point. Mr. Bruno’s first car was probably a limo and he would never call a ride sweet.”

Bobbie chuckled, although that simple action produced fresh shards of pain along the left side of her back. She bit back a groan and then asked, “Is he a geek?”

“Totally,” Tony replied, with a laugh and a quick glance in her direction.

“So are you, bro, and you’re not so bad,” Bobbie retorted, but Tony didn’t answer as he carefully turned down the street for her condo. He parked the car, exited the Camaro, and hurried around the front bumper to help her out of the seat. Each movement brought renewed pain in her back, but luckily the strange tingling sensation in her left hand and arm had abated, as had the equally troubling throb between her legs.

If anything, her hand and arm were feeling better. Maybe even stronger than they had that morning, if that was possible. Which it wasn’t, she told herself. It was only the adrenaline racing through her body that was creating such unusual sensations.

“Thanks for the ride home,” she said, and gave her brother an awkward one-armed hug.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” he asked, concern evident on his face.

“A long soak and I’ll be fine,” she reassured, although she was feeling anything but fine at that moment.

Knowing better than to push, her brother offered up a weak smile and left as Bobbie slowly made her way inside, her gait like that of an arthritic ninety-year-old. She would normally have pushed herself to make the climb to the third story, but the ache in her back was too intense, so she opted for the elevator instead.

Once inside her condo, she walked toward the breakfast bar, where an assortment of pain meds sat on the counter. She bypassed the various prescription medications and instead grabbed the Aleve bottle with her free left hand.

A left hand that was now surprisingly stronger. She tightened her hand on the plastic bottle, and her grip didn’t falter. She squeezed harder and harder until the knuckles on her hand were white with pressure and still her grip didn’t waver. The muscles remained fluid as she rotated her arm left and right. She lifted it higher, reaching for the sky and experiencing none of the weakness or restriction in movement that had been there before Adam had touched her.

Lowering her arm, she popped the lid on the bottle, spilled out two capsules, and swallowed them dry. Between the pain reliever and the soak she had mentioned, she hoped she would be well enough to join her family later for dinner. Despite all the bad things that had happened in the last few months, being around her family always made her feel better. In large part it had been their support that had pulled her back into this world after the explosion. They had kept her sane when fear, pain, and guilt might have driven her over the edge.

As she glanced around her apartment and caught a fleeting glimpse of the photos of her family on a nearby wall unit, a sense of balance permeated her.

She was almost whole, she acknowledged. She hadn’t expected to feel like that for a long time, all things considered. But there were still pieces missing in her life despite all the progress she had made.

As she recalled Adam and the way he had made her feel with a simple caress, she wondered if it wasn’t time to risk a relationship with a man. Although she wasn’t sure Adam would be a good candidate for that foray back into the dating life. Even without knowing very much about him, she knew they came from vastly different worlds, maybe too far apart for them to have anything in common.

Despite that, she itched to explore her attraction to him, but first she needed that soak. And if during that bath she also daydreamed a bit about the interesting Adam Bruno…

The tension in the room was palpable as the two men stood before him, militarily rigid, hands clasped before them, heads dipped in either deference or shame.

“You say there was another Hunter there? Possibly a Shadow Hunter?” Kellen Chakotay asked as he surged out of his chair, planted his fists on his desk, and leaned toward the two men in his cadre. His captain—Andres Rayu—sported a swollen nose and duo of black eyes while his second in command, Eduardo Rios, occasionally reached up to rub at a purpling mark across his throat.

“We think so.” Andres paused and shot an apprehensive look at his partner. “We couldn’t be sure. She—”

“A female Shadow?” Kellen said, and from the corner
of his eye examined his wife. She wrung her hands with worry and he understood why. The female Shadow Hunters were known to be particularly lethal, showing no mercy in who they killed in order to replenish their life forces.

Eduardo, who had been unusually silent and distant during the initial report, finally spoke up, but when he did, his voice was sandpaper raspy. It was clear it was costing him great effort to speak. “Could be. She wasn’t whole.”

“Not whole? Did her body bear signs of the smallpox?” Kellen asked, and walked around to where his man stood. Raising his hands, he brought one to rest along Eduardo’s throat injury and chastised, “Why have you not sought help?”

“Ashamed, Quinchu,” Eduardo replied, referring to Kellen by the title the Light Hunters used for their priests and priestesses. Only the Quinchu retained the abilities to gather energy that all the Hunters had possessed at one time.

The Quinchus and the murderous Shadows.

Tight-lipped, Kellen reminded, “We are not like the dark ones. We honor all life and relieve suffering.”

With that Kellen closed his eyes and tapped the well of stored power within himself, summoning the energies he had collected during the course of the day. Deep in his core, the forces coalesced, the weight of them dragging at his center. With control honed by decades of practice and millennia of tradition, Kellen sent his healing powers into the man with a gentle push. Beneath his palm an orange-red glow shimmered, and Eduardo’s body jumped with the discharge. Warmth erupted and then receded as he withdrew the healing energy, but in mere seconds Eduardo released a grateful sigh.

“Thank you, Quinchu,” Eduardo said, his voice restored.

Kellen turned to Andres, intending to deal with his injuries, but the captain of his cadre waved him off. “We must deal with the woman first, Quinchu.”

“The one you thought might be a Shadow Hunter. Did
you
see the pox on her?” he asked and walked over to where his wife waited on the couch, sat beside her, and laid a calming hand over her nervous ones.

“It was impossible to tell. It all happened so fast,” Eduardo advised.

“But she had an aura. A powerful one,” Andres supplied, but was quick to add, “We will not fail again, Quinchu.”

Kellen nodded and rubbed his forefinger across his lips as he considered what the men had reported. If a Shadow Hunter was nearby, searching as they were, it could confirm that Adam Bruno was who they thought. But based on their earlier report, his men seemed uncertain about the strength of the power the young CEO possessed.

“The man you tracked down—Adam Bruno—did he have the gift?” It would be impossible for Bruno not to be blessed if he was their son Kikin.

Once again his men hesitated, looking back and forth between each other before Andres noted, “He had some power, but it seemed weak. Not like the force you would expect in a man descended from two such powerful Quinchus as yourselves.”

Beside him, Eduardo was nodding, in obvious agreement with his captain’s assessment.

A deep, tortured sigh escaped his wife. Kellen understood. The report disappointed him, too. If Bruno’s
gift was weak, it might mean that he was a hybrid—half-human, half-Hunter. Such half-breeds often had abilities far beyond those of their fellow humans, but the hunting gift was not strong enough to be of much use.

And if Bruno was a hybrid, he was not their son.

With each year that passed and each failure to locate Kikin, who was supposed to be their future Quinchu, the hopes of his Light Hunter clan dimmed. Soon their future might be extinguished like the flame on a candle.

“Quinchu,” Andres said, sensing Kellen’s distress and pulling his attention back to the rest of the cadre, who stood silently by the door. “What do you wish for us to do now?”

“Find out if this woman is a Shadow. If so, we will have to be extremely careful.”

“What about the man?” Eduardo asked.

“Watch and wait. We must determine if he is our son before we do anything else.”

Clasping their hands to their chests in a salute and bowing their heads, the two men exited the room and the cadre followed, leaving him alone with his wife.

“Could we be so wrong?” Selina asked, the gray of her eyes like storm clouds over the desert they had left time and time again in their quest to find Kikin. This time their journey had been prompted by a grainy photo in a newspaper article. One of the men in the photo had looked like the Texas Ranger who had taken their son nearly twenty years earlier.

Kellen turned, his knees brushing against hers. He pushed back a stray lock of hair and tucked it behind her ear. Her hair had once been a wealth of coppery brown, but even there worry had taken its toll. Brash streaks of white salted the strands.

“The years may have faded our recollection of his powers,
Warmi,
” he said, using her ancient name instead of the modern ones they had adopted to hide their true origins.

“Nothing could take away my memory of Kikin’s aura. It was unique. Powerful,” Selina replied, her tone brooking no disagreement.

Kellen knew better than to argue with his strong-willed wife. “We will know soon enough, my love. If it is Kikin, the strength of his power will be growing as he nears the Equinox.”

For the Hunters, each third of their life brought changes. The years immediately surrounding the initial thirty—the first triad—represented the zenith of a Hunter’s powers and fertility.

“But if the Equinox comes upon him, he may die or injure another without our help,” Selina said worriedly.

“He is young enough that his change may not happen until he is with us and can mate with the Quinchu from the Ocean clan.”

Selina dipped her head and cradled the sharp line of Kellen’s jaw. “What of the woman with the aura? What if she is one of the Shadows?”

With a careless shrug, Kellen replied, “We do what we always do. We kill her.”

O
ne of his security people had delivered a thumb drive with the video Adam had requested barely an hour after the incident. Adam slipped the thumb drive into his computer, then hesitated, his mind replaying that initial shocking jolt of power as the first man had laid hands on him. Would the video from the security system show that thunderbolt or any of the others that followed? he wondered while worrying about the secrecy of such a revelation.

With a quick wave of his hand, the video began to play on the large-screen television at the far side of his office, and Adam rose to stand in front of it.

The image of him leaving the building, absorbed in his phone messages, played on the screen. Shortly thereafter, the first glimpse of Bobbie, leaning against the car in a simple white T-shirt molded to ample breasts and curve-hugging jeans, grabbed his attention. The video had not picked up her intense cerulean aura.

While the video had not documented the evidence of her power, it had recorded Adam’s initial reaction at his first glimpse of Bobbie, the quick glance followed by a slower obvious double-take. Part of it had been because of the waves of energy he had sensed surrounding her. But it had also been plain ol’ male appreciation: Bobbie Carrera was a very attractive woman.

That thought fled quickly as he viewed each development on the screen. Even now, safe in his office, the memory of the men’s touch brought fear, making his gut clench and causing sweat to gather at the base of his spine. Very little on the video gave testament that there had been anything different about the men or about Bobbie.

Except for possibly the streaks of light as he had intercepted the one man midair and then again when the men had disappeared into the van and raced away.

Adam paused the video at that point with a sharp slash of his hand. Approaching the large-screen television, he realized that part of a license plate was visible. But you didn’t have to watch a lot of cop shows to know that either the cars or the license plates involved in crimes like these were usually stolen.

Adam shut off the television and returned to his desk, frustrated that the recording hadn’t yielded anything new or valuable.

As he plopped into his chair, he thought about all the possible reasons for the attack.

It hadn’t been a simple mugging. The first man had said that they wanted him, so it was more likely it had been a kidnapping, but why? Because he was like them or for some human kind of reason?

Money? he considered. As of that morning, he was
worth close to ten million, thanks to a surge in the SolTerra stock price, but he wasn’t sure if someone would take such a risk in broad daylight. There were far richer people in the area, and without his approval, no one could move funds out of the various accounts in order to pay any ransom.