Updrift (30 page)

“Kate,” he whispered against her lips, humbled by the realization he’d been right, that they were so good together.

“Gabe, I love you,” she whispered back, and ice ran through his veins, dousing his ardor. He was not who she thought he was. He paused to rest his forehead on her shoulder, struggling silently with himself and the feelings her words invoked. The trust in her eyes, and the fluttering of the tiny heartbeat inside her sealed his fate. He needed to wait. He thought of a way to distract her, distract them both.

“I’m worried about the baby.” Kate checked her flat stomach and laughed. “What baby?” He placed his hand on her midriff and reflected what he felt and heard, the tiny life growing, the small, rapid heartbeat.

Kate was ecstatic. “Oh! Gabe!” she’d cried. “It’s our baby!”

Her joy sharpened his resolve. He wanted this, exactly this, but he wanted it to be for him, Peter. He would find a way to achieve it.

He let them talk for a while as soon-to-be parents do, how they hoped the baby had his mother’s hair, his eyes, how they would do everything to ensure he or she would be smart, and healthy and happy. Eventually, Peter stood up and moved away from her, pleading hunger. “I’ll go get us some breakfast.” She should stay in the suite, he warned, stay hidden from the palace staff.

She smiled uncertainly at him. “But what about you? What if the staff sees you?”

“They’ll just think I’m here on some errand for my mother. People are used to seeing Blakes around here, Kate.”

She looked perplexed…and he couldn’t worry about that too much. He felt her startle when he locked the door behind him.

Xanthe came the day after he called. Gabe watched her approach, her exotic, otherworldly appearance drawing stares as she made her way down the street toward his address.

He greeted her at the door. “Thank you for coming. I know how busy you are.”

“It’s my pleasure,” she replied, with the strange combination of warmth and distance he associated with her. “I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

He led her to the living room. “Yes. That’s why I contacted you, actually. I’m not sure I have a loss.” He invited her to sit. “It’s not something I feel safe discussing with anyone else. Can I get you some tea before I tell my story?”

He felt her reach with her intuition anyway, an automatic response he knew she couldn’t help. In seconds, she found his doubt, ascertained he did not, in fact, contain within him evidence of his wife’s death. “Hmm,” she mused. “That does bear some discussion.” Gabe nodded and left her to make friends with Soley while he brewed their tea.

When he came back with a tray, Xanthe was on the couch petting Soley. “You’ve found yourself quite the little companion, here.”

He smiled. “Yes, he’s all part of my evil plan. Usually, our intuition is a strength but in this situation, I need to keep some secrets. I just barely made it away from my family without alerting them to my thoughts.”

“You adopted Soley to sustain you?”

He heard the pity in her voice. “I know. Not the same as human or siren company. But isolation isn’t viable, as you know. I had to get him.”

He sat next to her on the couch and faced her, offering his hands. “May I?”

“Of course.” They grasped each other’s forearms, using contact to communicate Gabe’s memories and conclusions about Kate. Xanthe flinched when she saw the bull shark attack, and her heart raced sympathetically as Gabe recalled his visit to Kate’s mother. He then reviewed the strange visit they’d received the night before, including his—and his father’s—blind chase after another siren into the water.

“You’re right,” Xanthe acknowledged. “It had to have been a cloaker, and he had to have been a very good one to evade both you and Michael.” She sensed Gabe’s accusation against Peter Loughlin.

“Not yet,” she warned him. “I want more information first.”

He told her everything, including what he could about his own nascent cloaking skills, and Xanthe released him. Her eyes became unfocused as she ruminated.

He gave her a minute to digest his tale. “Are you aware of a correlation between grief and cloaking?”

“No, but it makes some sense. From what I know, the ability comes from retreating into yourself, from a desire to hide. That isn’t an option for most of us. In fact, I don’t think many of us
could
withdraw. Our nature is to reach out, and if we’re hurting we reach out harder.”

She sipped her tea thoughtfully before continuing. “I understand humans withdraw, though, so perhaps sirens such as you and your family, ones who have spent a lot of time in the human world…maybe retreat feels reasonable.”

“Peter has spent very little time among humans,” Gabe reminded her. “And he’s reputed to be the best cloaker of all time. Why would he think to retreat into himself?”

“Don’t rush to conclusions, please. I’m not sure we’re talking about Peter here, but, since you ask, being a child of a monarch is barely tolerable, in my opinion.” She offered an overview of the familial deprivation accompanying a royal title, and how she attributed the high divorce rate and general emotional instability of the royal class to parental division from their children.

“As for Peter, he’s the most stable example of royalty I’ve seen. He’s intelligent and capable—he did really well in law school—and he’s done a very good job running our affairs. Also, he’s close to his mother, which doesn’t happen often in the aristocracy. I’ve always seen their closeness as a sign of his mental health.”

For Gabe, several things clicked into place at once: Peter’s near constant presence at his mother’s side, his lack of a mate despite a number of interested parties, and the visceral loneliness Kate had sensed on two occasions. Weighed in conjunction with the intense attention Peter had paid Kate, particularly when he appropriated her during their visits to the palace, Gabe was sure Peter had played a role in Kate’s disappearance.

Now attuned to Gabe’s thoughts and their context, Xanthe reluctantly agreed with his deliberations. “You’ve experienced too many coincidences,” she conceded. “It’s a shocking possibility, but one we unfortunately should consider.”

Gabe spread his hands before him. “So you can see why I left Griffins Bay. My idea sounds nuts, and anyone who intuited it from me would, by implication, be involved in whatever problems I create now. I’d be putting everyone at risk.” He waited for Xanthe’s response.

“Peter is a powerful man but my job is to maintain our community’s stability. I need to hear more about your cloaking practice. Show me. Then we’ll discuss what steps we should take.”

Gabe would not be diverted. “I’ll need your help to get information on the Loughlins,” he insisted.

“I understand your conviction, Gabe. We’ll find out what’s going on, and I promise I’ll help.”

* * * *

Kate tried to keep up a positive front although her bravery caved as soon as she was left alone each morning. She had spent far too much time by herself and exhausted the distractions at hand, namely reading through the works of various authors she’d always intended to study in greater depth. During the past several weeks, she’d given up on Shakespeare because he was too tedious and his language distractingly archaic. If that made her an intellectual cretin, so be it. She found she wasn’t much into other revered writers, either, namely Faulkner and Styron, because they were just too depressing. She wondered if their style of exposition was common to Southern authors in general, as the works of Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers soon joined her list of literature she could no longer tolerate.

In trying to decide what her problem was, she concluded she had no enthusiasm at present for exploring all the ways in which human beings could feel miserable and alone. In her darkest moments, she believed this was because the stories she read itched too closely beneath her skin, felt too synonymous with the circumstances of her own life. She chided herself for indulging in melodrama when she thought this way.

When she started to believe comic books might be her only option, she was saved briefly by Austen and Dickens, although they too, quickly lost their appeal. Fundamentally, she was tired of reading, tired of being sequestered. She remembered how often she’d fantasized about just this situation: her time was all hers to spend, no one demanded anything of her, and every work of literature she could want was at her fingertips. Only a few weeks into the effort, however, she was restless and bored, something she never, never thought could happen. She longed for the busy schedule of her former job.

Gabe didn’t understand. “Just relax and enjoy yourself, Kate. Everything’s taken care of, everything’s easy here. Don’t you feel, maybe, a little fortunate?”

Okay, that was alarming, and a perspective she wouldn’t have attributed to Gabe. It made her feel more caged in, so she responded more sharply than she meant to. “I’m used to having a lot to do, Gabe, and I really need a stronger creative outlet, even for the short-term. Could I get my hands on a computer? Then, I could at least work on my blog…”

“You can’t get internet service here,” Gabe interjected quickly.

She leveled an incredulous stare at him. “You mean to tell me no one in the palace is able to connect with anyone off the island? I can’t believe that’s true. All of our parents were able to use their cell phones when they ambushed us last month.”

Gabe’s expression became harsh in a way she hadn’t seen before. “As you might expect, access has become restricted since the need for protection has escalated. I’ll get you a laptop but you won’t be able to use it to communicate with anyone.”

Kate was astonished. Who was this person she was arguing with? “Gabe, are you mad at me? For wanting something to do?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” He seemed to force himself to relax. As if each change in his expression was premeditated, Kate saw his face soften into something more familiar, saw him place his hands in his pockets and stand back on his heels as he often did…and she couldn’t shake the feeling he was doing it to manipulate her. He gazed over her head and drew a breath.

“Look. I know things are tense, and I’m sorry you’re bored. I’ll find a computer for you, and I’ll see what I can do about getting you internet access, okay?”

Kate was too weirded out to say much. Where had this mutual distrust come from? How could they have gone, so quickly, from being open and easy with each other to bickering like rivals? She resolved to try and fix it, at least as far as her own behavior was concerned. Still, she didn’t quite manage to keep the sarcasm from her voice when she told him, “That’ll be great. Thanks.”

* * * *

Peter was exhausted. He had, not surprisingly given his recent preoccupations, fallen behind in his work, and his efforts to both maintain his deception with Kate and run his government left him more and more depleted at the end of each day. He rose earlier and earlier to give himself more time at the office, which he knew left Kate feeling alone and wondering what had happened to her honeymoon. But it was a compromise he’d had to make, and, truthfully, the familiarity and control of governing was a welcome respite.

After her first month in captivity—for he knew that was how she was thinking of her time now—he abandoned his pretty plan to keep her contained to their suite but he hadn’t had a viable alternative to offer her at first. The laptop he’d procured helped for a while, although she wasn’t buying his argument concerning the palace-wide interdiction on internet access. She was technically savvy enough to figure out how to enable her wireless once—he’d just intercepted a missive to her mother—and he had no doubt she’d eventually figure a way around this control, especially given how solicitous she was of the few members of the staff he sent to her. They loved her, of course, and he knew her human pull might well sway one of them on any given afternoon, putting him in a jam sooner rather than later if she succeeded in getting an e-mail out.

Thanks to his excellent memory, he was able to identify all servants who had seen Kate when she’d visited with the real Gabe, and he made arrangements to transfer them in an effort to cover his tracks. This exodus left a gap in professional coverage at the castle, so he also put out a call for new replacement guards, people who had never heard of Catherine Blake. Meanwhile, he struggled to find a way to allow her to roam the castle and grounds more freely.

That was when he hatched the plan to change her appearance, and, after that, introduce her as someone other than who she was. For his part, he remained Gabriel Blake when he was with her, visiting on family business if he had to explain, which he never did in Kate’s presence. His mother knew nothing of Gabe’s—or Kate’s, for that matter—guest status in her home. Kenna’s medication and preoccupation with her work kept her safely in the dark, thank God.

Kate chose her alias. Peter, posing as Gabe of course, suggested she take one as an extra layer of protection and as a condition for her to leave their suite. Elizabeth Hughes had been Kate’s paternal grandmother, and her family believed Kate resembled her. If he could not be with her when she was roaming, he prepared her with a bit of hypnosis to help her be more convincing in her projection.

If anyone stopped her, she was to report she was staying as Peter Loughlin’s guest.

Her first request was to visit the kitchen. “It’s one of my interests, and I can’t stand to sit still and read another minute,” she complained. “Is there a garden on the property I can dig in?”

“Sure.” He smiled at her indulgently. “Vegetable or flower?”

“Um, vegetable, of course…” Kate trailed off, giving him an odd look.

Ah. Something Gabe would have known. He hurried to recover from his misstep. “I mean, I know vegetables are your first love, but you could try your hand at flowers too, if you want?”

“Oh.” She seemed mollified. “No. Show me to the cabbages, please. And then where the white wine and bacon are so I can cook them for us.” She poked him playfully in the ribs and grabbed his hand to swing it between them. He found her burst of enthusiasm encouraging, and he wanted badly to sustain her good mood.