It was a volume that Demeter, their teacher in Ionian studies, had shown them in one of their indoctrination classes.
Tessa hadn’t thought of the lessons that way when she’d been a little girl. Instead she’d been fascinated by the history of the Ionians and the training in using their psychic powers.
Now she knew that the special schooling had been designed to make the girls want to grow up and take their place as members of the Sisterhood.
She’d been intrigued by this particular book all those years ago but hadn’t questioned any of the information. Now she thought it might be pertinent.
After Sophia had come home from the attack on the road, Tessa had asked Cynthia if any of the Ionians had left the order. The high priestess had answered in the negative, but Tessa couldn’t stop wondering if that was really true.
She turned on the light, then scanned the library shelves and didn’t see the book she was looking for.
Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to give the room a closer inspection and found a locked cabinet under the shelves opposite the window. The lock might have stopped her, but she was too determined to give up. Again she searched and found a small gold key in a drawer above the cabinet doors.
It fit the lock. Inside the cabinet was the book she remembered, bound in white leather.
Crossing to one of the comfortable armchairs, she sat down and began to turn the pages. It was a list of all the Ionians, down through the ages, copied from old scrolls and kept up to date by the order. The first entries were in ancient Greek, and she couldn’t read them. Then they switched to modern languages. Spanish. Albanian. Chinese. Now they were in English.
As a girl, she’d been thrilled to see her own name and date of birth in the list. And saddened to see the notation on her mother’s death.
But what if an Ionian had been born into the order who was missing from the sisters at the spa, and there was also no record of her death?
Turning backward through the most recent entries, she began looking for the births of all the women currently here.
She could account for all the Ionians now at the spa, until she came to an entry that stopped her.
Linda.
Tessa’s heart began to pound.
Apparently she’d been born in the first years of the twentieth century. According to the book, she hadn’t died. But she wasn’t here, either.
Which must mean that she had left the group and not returned.
Unless there was some mistake in the book, which Tessa couldn’t believe, not when all the records had been kept so meticulously.
So where was Linda? Had she died under mysterious circumstances? Was she AWOL?
Tessa shivered. Or had something worse happened?
She kept looking and found another name. Chandra. She had been born in the mid-1940s and never died either, as far as the record was concerned.
The last name she found was Julia, from the late 1940s. Again, missing in action.
Who were they? Had they all met the same fate? Did Tessa dare ask about them?
CHAPTER
NINE
FRUSTRATION HAD JASON plunging back into the search he’d started for the other Minot. He could imagine the guy was doing the same thing, plowing through property records, looking for the rival who had foiled his plans in the desert.
But Jason was sure the other guy wouldn’t find him because he’d prepared too well. He’d bought his house five years ago, and rented it out until he was ready to move to Sedona. Which meant that nobody was going to find him in any recent property transfers. And if anybody started asking around town, he didn’t think they’d connect a Minot with the new vet.
Was the other Minot as methodical?
Jason had made a list of recent property transfers in the area and also rentals, and he’d been checking out the purchasers and renters.
So far he hadn’t come up with anything he could take to the bank. But he had lots of time to keep searching.
Or maybe he should go back to the spa and give all of the horses a physical exam—whether they needed it or not. Maybe Sophia would come down to the stable again.
If she didn’t, that would be worse than staying away on his own.
WHEN
a light tap sounded at Sophia’s door, she sat bolt upright in bed imagining that Jason Tyron had somehow come to her room.
But he wouldn’t dare!
It must be one of her sisters. Quickly she got out of bed and crossed the tile floor. When she opened the door, she found Tessa standing in the hallway.
“May I come in?” her sister asked.
“Of course.”
As Tessa stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, Sophia turned on a bedside lamp.
Her sister peered at her. “I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
Tessa scuffed her foot against the tile floor. “I came to ask you a favor.”
“If I can.”
“Can you help me see the future?”
Sophia sucked in a sharp breath. “You know that neither one of us was very good at that.”
Tessa’s voice took on a note of desperation. “I know. But I’m afraid. I feel like everything’s changing.”
Sophia understood because it was true for her, as well. She’d been lying awake, worrying about Jason Tyron. Maybe this was her chance to find something out.
“I want to feel . . . safe,” her sister said.
Sophia understood that, too. Still, she wasn’t sure they could accomplish anything.
“The temple would be best, but we can’t go down there alone, and I don’t want to talk to anyone else about this,” Tessa murmured.
“We can use the altar in here,” Sophia answered, gesturing toward the table that sat in front of the window. Since she might bring a lover to her room, it looked like an ordinary piece of furniture. Opening the drawer in front, she took out a length of fine lace, a solid gold plate, and a fat candle.
After spreading the lace along the width of the table, she set the candle on the plate and lit it.
The sisters each knelt on the small rug in front of the table, joining hands and closing their eyes the way they’d done as girls.
Sometimes they’d felt a flicker of future knowledge, but nothing that had ever helped them or made them feel more secure.
She felt Tessa tense and knew she was groping for images of events that hadn’t happened yet.
Although she wanted to know her own future, it stretched in front of her like a great void. But maybe she could help Tessa.
She couldn’t exactly read Tessa’s thoughts, but she felt a mental joining.
“Focus on what will be,” Tessa murmured. “On our lives as they unfold.”
Sophia tried to do as her sister asked, but she could pick up nothing concrete, only Tessa’s desperate desire to discover what was ahead.
She felt the strain—her own and Tessa’s. She wanted to give up a struggle that was obviously useless.
Then she picked up something from her sister’s mind. “Who is Linda?” she whispered.
“You caught that from my thoughts?”
“Yes.”
“She’s someone we don’t know.”
Sophia was going to ask another question when an image leaped into her mind. She saw a large building looming in front of her. A church, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure. Smoke billowed around it.
“What?”
Tessa gasped, and pulled her hands away.
CHAPTER
TEN
SOPHIA’S EYES SNAPPED open. “What did you see?”
“Nothing.”
“A church. Burning.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then why did you break the connection like that?”
Tessa turned her head to the side. “I . . . don’t know.”
When she scrambled up, Sophia also stood, then leaned down to put out the candle.
“Tell me what frightened you.”
“Nothing specific. Just a vague . . . dread.”
That was a lie, Sophia knew. There had been something specific. Something that had alarmed them both.
“About Linda?”
“I don’t know.” Tessa was already out the door, leaving Sophia shaken.
She’d been in bad enough shape. She didn’t need to take on Tessa’s burdens as well.
Sophia couldn’t go back to sleep. Finally, she got up and went to her office, where she struggled to focus on work.
Did her future merge with Jason Tyron’s?
Impossible. Her future was with her sisters.
Yet she was guarding her thoughts from them, lest one of her sisters discover what had happened in the hayloft. She had no shame about enjoying sex with a man and walking away from him.
It was the other part that worried her, the sense of connection with him that she never should have felt.
Worse, she still didn’t know who Jason Tyron was. Not really.
If he was a Minot, he could even be the one who had attacked her in the desert.
As soon as that idea surfaced, she thrust it roughly away. She might be looking for excuses to mistrust him, but she didn’t have to go that far. She’d have known if it was him. When the attacker had touched her intimately, she hadn’t liked it. But she had liked Jason Tyron’s touch—very much.
She’d thought again about hooking up with the hunky gym instructor, Tex Somerville, who’d been hired for his sex appeal as well as his knowledge of weight machines, aerobics, and fat-burning routines.
But she couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for him, not when she compared him to Jason.
Speaking of which . . .
She looked out the window and saw his blue truck shining in the morning sunlight.
She should be making surprise visits to the stables to see how he was getting on with the horses. In fact, Ophelia was doing that from time to time.
If anyone noticed that Sophia was staying away, they didn’t comment. When she got questions about how the new vet was doing, she always answered, “Fine,” knowing that sooner or later she was going to have to make a decision about the man.
Like, was she endangering her sisters by not admitting her suspicions? She hated to think that was true.
She had never felt more unsure of herself. Never felt more like she was simply going through the motions of her duties. But even when her heart wasn’t in her work, there was no escape from the details of daily life. She had a quick breakfast in the lounge, then went to check on the stock in the gift shop.
Some of the sisters rotated working there, especially the younger ones who had recently been assigned jobs at the spa. Some of them liked selling beautiful jewelry and crafts and reading material to spa guests. Others felt it was a waste of their talents.
This morning, Tessa was behind the counter, and she looked up, catching Sophia’s eye, sending her a silent message that she wanted to discuss something.
Was she finally going to talk about the night they’d tried to see the future together? With equal parts anticipation and dread, Sophia walked into the shop.
Two women were there, one in her fifties, the other closer to seventy and leaning on an ebony cane with a silver dragon head.
The older one purchased a couple of books on meditation and gentle yoga and left. The second one, a well-off matron, lingered longer. Some guests were curious about the Ionians and asked a lot of questions. Maybe she hoped to see Tessa and Sophia exchanging a secret handshake, because she kept glancing at them as she fingered the expensive silver and turquoise jewelry that the spa took on consignment from local artists.
Sophia also examined the stock, seeing that they were getting low on books about the Sedona area and on natural healing. Moving to another section of shelves, she rearranged some of the herbal products that the sisters made at the spa, lining up jars that patrons had moved around.
The customer had walked over to a display of crystal pendants.
“Which do you think looks best on me?” she asked Tessa, holding two up.
“I think the white quartz. But you might think about what effect you want from the crystal.”
“Such as?”
They went into a discussion of the properties of the various specimens, after which the woman bought the white one that had first caught her eye.
When the guest had left, Tessa shook her head. “Do you think working in a gift shop fulfils my destiny as an Ionian?”
“It’s not the only thing you do here. You give a lot of the treatments, and some of our guests specifically ask for you.”
“But clerking in the shop always feels so superficial. I should have gone to college the way you did. Then I could help with the accounting or something.”