“Now,” he said, wrapping an arm behind her back and pulling her close, “let me rephrase my question from earlier. Did you sense anything odd about the guards? Did you see their auras?”
“I didn’t look.” She’d been too enamored to think about it. “Why?”
Cayne shrugged, again mysterious.
“Hey—that’s the elevators down there. Score. But before we meet back up with them, I have a question for you: Are you going to be okay leaving me here while you guys go out and look for the tiger?”
“Of course not,” Cayne said stiffly. “I never said I would.”
“Okay, well I’m thinking maybe you should do another fly-over.”
The elevator opened and Cayne tugged her inside, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her in between his legs. Judging by the serious look his face, he was locked into the conversation and happened to simply want her close. But suddenly all Julia could think about was how he’d felt, under her, on that couch…and how every day seemed to prove, in some fresh new way, that they might not have the time together that she wanted for them.
She rose up on her tip-toes and kissed his lips—and Cayne took the bait. He groaned and pushed her gently into one of the corners, pressing his body against hers, trailing warm kisses down her neck. “Do you think—” he breathed— “that I would let anyone take you from me?”
“No,” she gasped.
He nicked her lip with his teeth, and Julia squeezed his neck. “Do a flyover,” she said. “I’m—” he kissed her— “tired of waiting.”
His hands, on her hips, moved lower. “I would hate to keep you waiting,” he said wickedly.
When the doors opened, Cayne gave her a naughty grin and smoothed her hair out of her face.
“I’ll do a flyover,” he said. “What’s the point of exercising restraint when you’re already caught?”
She rubbed her lips and wondered the same thing—about a much more pleasant topic. Holding Cayne’s hand, she shut her eyes and pictured them together. Really together. As a normal couple.
If they could just find the tiger on the roof.
CHAPTER SIX
“I don’t know where he is,” Carlin said, crossing her arms, “but if he wants a place in this room, he needs to come back now.”
Julia arched a brow, and Meredith wrapped her arms around Carlin’s shoulders. “Car, Car, Car… Your hostile emotions are giving me a headache.”
Meredith was joking, but the mention of ‘headache’ made Julia flinch. She guzzled more bottled water, hoping the Advil she’d taken would break down fast. Like…faster than the time it would take for Cayne to notice that her head was hurting again, just a teensy little bit.
“I hate to be the one to say it, but this is slightly sketchy,” Drew said, not sounding at all like he hated saying it.
“What do you mean by sketchy?” Cayne asked, in what to Julia sounded like a normal voice.
Drew must have imagined an edge. His tone got a little more hostile and he shifted into a fighting stance, ticking points off on his fingers. “Let’s go over this one more time: I lived at the compound all my life, and I never saw him there. Then suddenly, after a huge attack, he shows up, and he wants to come with us? Julia doesn’t recognize his aura, and he claims he’s some kind of experiment? Which I know none of us buy.”
Carlin opened her mouth, but Drew cut her off.
“Those of us who aren’t crushing.”
“Hey!”
“Oh please. And Julia… he said she’s The One. He knew what her headache
meant—” Julia flinched a little, tightening her jaw against the pressure/pain inside her skull— “but he never told us how he knew. When he met Julia he told her he worked for The Three—”
“Actually he called himself a consultant.”
“Yeah, well I don’t see much difference. And how do we know he isn’t still ‘consulting’?”
The room was silent; everyone was frowning.
“Those are valid points,” Cayne agreed, “but if he is working for The Three, he’s had plenty of chances to help deliver Julia back to them. I agree, it’s odd that he hasn’t shown back up, but I’m not too concerned. The security here is excellent. And, if it came to it, I could fly away with Julia. Edan has never been a threat to her.”
“Speaking of flying…” Julia braced herself to speak for Cayne, but he beat her to it, leaning forward in the huge wing-backed chair where he sat in front of the fireplace like the king of a castle.
“I’d like to do a fly-over. I’ve shown my wings once without it causing trouble, and it would help us find the tiger on the landing pad sooner. I could go at night, and I could cover the area in an hour or so. Helicopter landing pads are easily to spot from the sky. Julia will come with me. If we don’t find the tiger or anything that resembles it, then we can try another area.”
“Shhhh!” Carlin slashed her hand through the air, and she dove for the phone, a small, black cordless thing with an extremely quiet ringer.
“Hello,” she answered, then broke into a grin—that faded fast.
“It’s him,” Mer reported, zeroing in on Carlin’s feelings.
A few seconds later, Carlin hung up the phone.
“What did he say?” Mer asked Carlin.
“He’s at a hostel.”
“Here?”
Carlin nodded.
“There are hostels here?”
“He met a girl,” Carlin said woefully, “and he’s followed her to a hostel on the resort grounds.”
Cayne made an approving face, so classically ‘Martian’ that Julia smiled a little. “When is he coming back?”
Carlin shrugged, then slumped down on the bed. As soon as she was down, she was up again. She tossed her arms out. “What a shady bastard.” The curl on the “r” was more intense than usual. “As for me, I want to try the slopes. Anybody else?”
Mer held up a hand. “Let’s info-dump first. Anybody find out anything?” When no one spoke, Meredith sighed. “Well, I did. These people make money hiding sort-of, kind-of criminals. Like, white collar. Martha Stewart. Not convicted ones, but people who are being investigated. Not Americans, either. Sketchers from the EU.”
“Lifestyles of the rich and shady,” Drew said drolly.
“Exactly. So they have excellent security and they seem to be discreet. Discretion is on everyone’s mind, all the time. They feel strongly about it.”
“Good to know,” Cayne said. “I spoke to someone with the resort’s security. They screen guests well. The only reason we got in was Carlin.”
Carlin blanched.
“Her Uncle Ferdinand is a guest here sometimes.”
After a few more minutes of shared intuitions and a quick pull-back of the heavy curtains, it was decided: There would be no skiing, because they were in the midst of a blizzard, which meant there would be no flying (Cayne shrugged the storm off, but Julia ordered him grounded), and there could be no roof sleuthing at other resorts by other means because Edan had taken the van to the hostel, which the map said was two miles away.
After a few minutes of debate, they decided to eat a late lunch at a Spanish restaurant on the west side of the first floor.
“I hope they have real Spanish food,” Carlin said wistfully. “The cooks at the compound tried their best, but it was never as good as in Spain.”
“Carlin, we’re in Switzerland,” Drew said, like he was breaking bad news, and even Cayne cracked a smile.
“True, but I guarantee in this resort they will have a Spanish chef.”
The conversation reminded Julia of group home field trips. One Saturday a month the older kids would go on field trips to places that at the time seemed fancy (one month, it was Graceland), and Julia has always felt that they stuck out like a bunch of sore, unwanted thumbs.
The ornate hallways at House of The Gods actually were fancy. With Carlin’s bank account and Edan’s Edan-ness, they definitely weren’t a bunch of poor kids; here they were another kind of outcast.
She wondered what these people would think if they knew they were hiding Chosen. Assuming, of course, that they knew what Chosen were.
She wished she was
just
Chosen. She envied Meredith, Drew, and Carlin and the rest, although at the same time she was grateful for her friends. They’d stuck with her—and they didn’t have to. She wondered grimly how much longer they she would need them to.
Her headache was mild enough that the Advil had helped a lot, but Edan had warned her it would get worse again. He said each time, there would be more pain to transfer. Meaning one day, he just wouldn’t be able to do it anymore. Her mind flashed a picture of the compound’s great glass pyramid; as quickly as it had sprung up, Julia reminded herself that the place was gone, and that even if it wasn’t she would never go back to The Three and their Chosen crazyland. She’d rather die.
Meredith’s gasp interrupted her thoughts, and Julia’s initial bite of fear was replaced by something warm and fuzzy. One of Jess Stanton’s body guards was at the end of the hall, pushing open a door to a stairwell. At least he looked like one of them. Decked out in ragged black jeans, snow-crusted black boots, and an amazingly hot red and black flannel jacket, the guy bumped Julia’s blood pressure up a notch.
Normally she’d never have the nerve to look someone that holy freaking hot right in the face, but her eyes didn’t give her an option. As her gaze caressed his deliciously sculpted nose, cheekbones, and chin, settling on his omniscient dark brown eyes, she decided no way in hell had she ever seen the guy before. His black hair bounced as he moved, a short—but not super short—cut that made his white highlights stand out.
She only saw him for a second, bit Julia felt like a dirty cheater. He didn’t look like one of Jess’s body guards, so who was he? She remembered Cayne’s question that morning, and wished she’d had the presence of mind to open her sight. There was definitely something up with those hotties.
Pretty quickly, Carlin was talking about getting his number, sending Mer into a long lament about how bad her hair had looked. “I need to find a ladies’ room.” Julia watched Meredith and Carlin’s backs as they walked, remembering what she’d always heard about girls: three’s a crowd.
She sighed, and Cayne’s hand closed around hers. He’d been walking a step behind her, surveying the hall and probably Jess Stanton’s guard, but he’d somehow sensed her gloomy thoughts. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. Somewhere behind them, Drew cleared his throat.
“Something to say?” Julia teased.
“Get a room,” he murmured.
“We have one,” Julia giggled.
She turned around to look at Drew and, to her surprise, he winked.
She grinned. The guy could be prickly sometimes, but he could also be a sweetie. Even though he wasn’t Cayne’s biggest fan, he always had Julia’s best interest at heart; he had from the moment they met, and Julia knew he always would.
Meredith and Carlin swooped into a bathroom near the lobby, and Julia thought about their little group. It felt ‘off’ without Edan. Despite his shadiness, the guy had at least provided some badly-needed levity. Other than the concerns harbored by Drew and Cayne, everyone’s skepticism had lessened with time. It was true that if he was with The Three’s Chosen—distinguishable from the Swiss Chosen, or Swosen, as Edan had named them—he would have helped Adam and Co. catch Julia. Now that he’d run off with some snow bunny, Julia figured they should be lowering their suspicions rather than raising them.
Drew went into the guys’ room, and she sat down on a bench, pulling Cayne with her.
He narrowed his eyes. “Your head okay?”
She forced a smile that made her feel like a horrible liar. “Doing just fine. I have a question, though.”
“Toss.”
She grinned. “It’s ‘shoot,’ but ‘A’ for effort. And my question is about Edan. I know you said you had doubts, but I kind of thought you guys had become friends. I mean, he freed you from the compound and you said he peeped in on you when you first got there. If he really is just an innocent man-whore, that was nice of him, right?”
Cayne shook his head. “I don’t have friends. And I want you to know the only reason he’s still with us is I know that I could kick his ass.”
Julia covered her mouth. “Cayne! You sound like…well, a teenage guy.”
He rubbed his face. “If that’s the case, I’ll have to pay more attention to the way I speak.”
“No, it’s cool. I mean, it doesn’t bother me at all. But it does bother me that you said you don’t have friends. What about me? And Meredith? And Edan, too. You do friendish stuff with him. Like Velcro-board chess, right after we got to Zurich.”
Hilariously, the security guard named Henry picked that moment to strut up with his hand outstretched for Cayne’s. Striking a very good impression of a friend, he smiled and said, “Hey, man. You still up for the WoW tonight?”
Cayne’s smiled, and it
looked
genuine. Drew walked out of the guys’ room, and Henry welcomed him into the conversation, too.
Julia had played WoW before, and it was…interesting; but settling into a quiet nook with a good book…
That
would be relaxing. Maybe she could hang out with the girls, hit the bookstore, and go to bed early.
She stood and mouthed “be right back” to Cayne, then turned and headed for the desk, where she hoped they could tell her the bookstore’s hours.
She thought about what Mer had said and she opened her Sight, wondering about the nature of the desk workers. Curly was on duty again, wearing a crisp white resort shirt and sitting backwards on a fancy-looking wooden chair. The young-Norm-MacDonald look alike smiled his dimpled smile at a flatscreen that peeked out from behind a plant. His aura was pinkish red with a side of deep purple. Ouch—that didn’t look good. At some point, probably recently, he’d lost someone. She wondered who.
His smile stretched into something more intense. Much more. Suddenly he jumped up, pumping his fist, and Julia froze, Cayne’s name a breath away from being screamed.
“Come on, you little bitch! Fall, fall!” Curly cried. The girl beside him, a pretty redhead in an identical white shirt, started jumping up and down.
“Go, go, you can do it,” she chanted she was from the United States. Somewhere in the Midwest. “Come on come on!”
Julia glanced back toward Cayne, thankful none of the guys appeared to have seen her freak out, and then peeked at the girl’s aura—high-strung, sunshine colors overlaying more shallow tones.