by Hilary Duff
He was right, of course. “Let him go,” I said.
“Clea …”
“I want to hear what he has to say. Let him go.”
Ben released the man’s arm.
I took a second to tuck my father’s watch safely inside my camera bag, then fixed the man with a stare and asked, “Who are you?”
He took a deep breath, as if the answer required a long story, but then he let it out and replied simply, “I’m Sage. It’s nice to meet you, Clea.”
Sage. I felt a thrill when I heard him say my name.
“Nice necklace,” Sage added.
“What the hell?” Ben exploded. “This isn’t a cocktail party!”
“Your boyfriend’s very protective,” Sage said. “That’s good.”
“I’m not interested in what you think,” I said.
That was such a lie. I was very interested in what he thought, and I desperately wanted him to know that Ben was not my boyfriend. I tried to ignore the feeling.
“Grant Raymond, my father, disappeared over a year ago, from right around here. You have his watch. Can you explain that?”
Sage ignored my question. “Your father was a good man,” he said. “Be safe, Clea. Live a long, happy life.”
He reached out and grazed his fingers over my cheek. My skin tingled at his touch. I leaned in for more, but he was gone, already pushing through the brush.
“WAIT!” I was furious at my body for betraying me so I couldn’t run after him. I’d finally found Sage. I knew without a doubt that he was the man from my dreams. Not just someone who looked like him. It was him—the one who saw me like no one else ever had—and now I could only watch him disappear into the woods. I still had no idea how he knew my father. Had Sage hurt him? I didn’t think so, but my head was spinning with so many different feelings, I didn’t know what to believe.
Ben pulled out his cell phone.
“He’s not gonna get away. I’m calling the police. I’m gonna tell them he’s involved with your dad’s disappearance. We can describe him—we even have pictures. Wait—no—we can’t show them the pictures, that would get too complicated. Do you think we should show them the pictures?”
I heard Ben’s manic voice, but I had no idea what he was saying. I couldn’t take my eyes off the last spot in the brush where I’d seen Sage.
Thump! A huge black blob fell from the trees and landed on Ben, pinning him to the ground.
“BEN!”
Before I could move, someone else grabbed my arms, pinning them behind my back. Automatically I kicked my good heel back as hard as possible, nailing my assailant in the groin. His arms loosened, and I shot my elbow backward into his face, then wheeled and drove jab after jab into his solar plexus … until another person grabbed my arms from behind and lifted me into the air. I flailed and kicked, then the first guy grabbed my legs and pinned them to his sides.
“Ooh, we got ourselves a feisty one!” The man’s accent was European, thick and difficult to understand. I threw my head back to see his face; I wanted to give a good description when I got the chance. I smelled it before I could see it: the stench of decay from his black, ruined teeth. His pasty cheeks were sunken. Open sores stood out on his forehead and chin. He had a huge, faded tattoo across his throat: a skull with fire bursting out of its eye sockets and the letters CV below it. He looked sickly, but he was strong. I couldn’t move my arms.
His face spread in a wide, reeking smile. “Hey! Look who it is!” He turned to his friends—the one securing my legs, and the one who was holding Ben. “Look who we’ve got! It’s that woman’s daughter. It’s … what’s her name? Clea! Clea Raymond! We got a celebrity on our hands. A rich celebrity. Just think about the possibilities, gentlem—”
Whoosh! Something swung down from the trees and slammed him violently on the bridge of his nose, which exploded in blood. As the man lost consciousness he dropped my arms, and my body swung downward. My head smashed hard onto the ground. I literally saw stars. I fought really hard to shake them off. The world grew more and more distant and fuzzy … until it faded out.
The world started to come back well before I could open my eyes.
I couldn’t see yet, but I could feel.
It felt like I was moving.
Quickly. I was moving very quickly.
I was moving very quickly, but I wasn’t doing the work. How was that possible?
Wait—I felt arms clutching my legs.
It was the guy—it had to be—the one who’d had my legs. He still had them, and now I was … yes, I was slung over his shoulder and he was running with me.
As my senses continued to return, I tried to work out an advantage. Did I have one? Was there a way out?
I did have one advantage: The guy holding me had to think I was still unconscious. I felt for his shirt and jacket, and carefully pulled them up.
I took a deep breath, then as hard and as fast as I could, I dug my nails into his skin, feeling the satisfaction of four long channels of blood opening in their wake.
“OW!!” the man screamed.
My eyes flew open, and in a flash all my senses returned. That voice. It was Sage.
I was slung over Sage’s shoulder, and he was running.
Was he kidnapping me?
I could move now, and I writhed and flailed against him. “Put me down!”
“Stop it!” Sage growled, and behind me Ben’s voice hissed, “Clea!”
I looked up and saw Ben. He put his fingers to his lips, then pointed behind him.
It all came together now. Sage had saved us, but we were still in trouble. I probably hadn’t been unconscious that long; we were still in the same junglelike brush as before.
Suddenly a rush of panic surged through me.
“My camera!” I hissed to Ben. My camera bag wasn’t on my shoulder. My father’s watch was inside. I’d lost it.
Ben held up the camera bag. Of course he wouldn’t leave it behind. I could have kissed him.
So we were safe for the moment … safe-ish …but I still didn’t like being helplessly slung over someone’s shoulder. I almost demanded that Sage let me down again, but between my throbbing head and unsteady ankle, we’d probably move faster if I stayed where I was.
My head was still a little swimmy, and something was nagging at me. Something the attackers had said … but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It didn’t help that I probably had a concussion, and was now hanging upside down and bouncing around. Holding my head up was making me nauseous, so I hung back down. Also not comfortable. I thought about Rayna, how she swore by her yoga classes and the way they “allowed her body to achieve maximum relaxation.” I wondered if she’d be able to find a position that was comfortable while jouncing around inverted on someone’s back. I wondered if she’d be more or less relaxed in this position if she knew the back in question belonged to a possible incubus who’d been haunting her dreams.
I giggled.
I was clearly not one hundred percent.
“In here,” I heard Sage whisper, and he slung me off his shoulder and into his arms. He was standing in front of what looked like solid brush, but he parted the foliage with his foot to reveal a small hole. Ben crawled inside. Then Sage looked down at me.
“You okay to crawl?” he whispered.
I nodded, and he set me down on the ground. I had to lower myself almost completely flat to get inside, and I clawed my way forward for what seemed like an eternity. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could hear the scratch of Ben’s shoes just ahead of me. I listened for Sage behind me. I couldn’t hear him. Was he there? I didn’t even have room to turn around in here.
My throat grew tight and I couldn’t swallow. What if this was a trap? What if Sage was an evil spirit, and this was how he’d strike? What if Ben was about to reach a dead end? We’d try to crawl backward … only to find that Sage had closed off the entrance, leaving us to suffocate in this makeshift coffin.
Was that how he got my dad’s watch? Had Sag
e killed my father?
I started hyperventilating, but forced in a slow, long breath, willing calm into my body. Losing consciousness now would be the worst thing I could do. I was letting myself go back to Extreme Thinking, when I had to be in the moment and aware. Like Rayna doing her yoga.
Rayna. Yoga. Aware.
I recited it like a mantra to help me stay calm, and within moments the crawlway opened into a large cave, with ceilings eight feet high. A tiny bit of light streamed in from above, just enough to make out the space and Ben. He rushed over to help me to my feet.
“Tell me I’m not the only one who thought he’d set us up,” he murmured.
“Totally imagined a huge dead end,” I agreed.
We laughed with giddy relief as Sage emerged into the cave.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded, and then I remembered—the thing that had been nagging me.
“The men who attacked us … they didn’t know who I was at first.”
“Because they weren’t after you,” Sage said. “They’re after me.”
“Who’s after you?” I asked. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You should,” I countered. “If you don’t, I could turn you in as the guy behind my father’s disappearance.”
Sage looked at me in disbelief. “I just saved your life. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“Not if you won’t admit what you know. You could be just as dangerous as they are.”
“You really believe that?”
He looked at me, and we both knew I didn’t believe it at all. Not really. But I wasn’t going to admit it. I held his gaze as he leaned against the wall and lowered himself to the ground, settling in.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything I can. I have to, because as things stand now … we’re stuck together.”
seven
“ACTUALLY,” Ben countered, “we’re not stuck together at all. We’re staying here only until we’re safe. Then we leave, and if you’re lucky, we don’t turn you in to the police.”
“That’s funny,” Sage said, then turned to me. “Your boyfriend’s funny. But you’re not going to the police when we get out of here, because the last thing you want is for me to be anywhere except by your side.”
“Yeah, right,” Ben scoffed.
“Listen, I know how these guys work. They saw me help you, so now they think we’re together and they can use you to get to me. I’ve seen it happen before.” Sage turned to me, and his face grew serious. “I saw it happen with your father.”
“You need to tell me how you know him,” I said. “I want to know everything. Where did you meet him?”
“I didn’t, really. He met me. He came looking for me because I have information about something he was interested in.”
“Which was …?” I urged.
Sage took a deep breath, then let it out as he replied, “Something called the Elixir of Life.”
Ben perked up. “What do you know about the Elixir of Life?”
“I know it’s ridiculous! Please tell me my dad wasn’t taken by some psychopath who thought it was real.”
“I can’t tell you that,” Sage said.
“But that’s so stupid!” The waste of it was more than I could handle. The idea that someone could hurt my dad because of something that didn’t even exist …
“Grant didn’t think it was stupid,” Ben said, cutting into my thoughts. “He believed in it. He knew it would be the ultimate breakthrough in modern medicine.”
“It’s not medicine,” I said. “It’s a fairy-tale drink that makes people live forever.”
“In large doses,” Ben said. “In smaller doses it has incredible healing powers. It cures any disease.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” I asked.
“You haven’t seen all your dad’s research. He has volumes of it, and it’s not just myths, it’s in history, too. How do you think he knew where to dig up the vials?”
“The empty vials,” I clarified.
“Empty,” Sage chimed in, “because the Elixir had been moved somewhere else. That’s the information I have—I know where it is.”
“You know where it is?” Ben’s entire energy changed; suddenly his whole face filled with excitement.
“I do.” Sage spoke slowly, as if it were an effort to make sure he chose just the right words. “But I don’t know exactly how to get it. It’s like I have only one piece of the puzzle. Clea’s father said he had the rest.”
Ben nodded eagerly. “Okay, wow, this totally makes sense … but how did he know where to find you?”
“I don’t know,” Sage said. “I didn’t make it easy. I’ve been in hiding from two very dangerous groups of people who would do anything to get the Elixir: the Saviors of Eternal Life and Cursed Vengeance.”
“Cursed Vengeance,” I murmured. “CV. The guy who grabbed me had ‘CV’ tattooed on his neck.”
“So that was them,” Sage agreed. “Both groups have been around a long time, but they seemed to get stronger after your father excavated the Elixir vials, so I made myself disappear. No one had ever found me until he knocked on my door. It was shocking, actually, and I never would have let him in except I recognized him from all the news stories. Plus, he looked so serious.…”
“Like Dr. Prichard said,” I realized. “He told us Dad was very intense the days before he disappeared.”
“That’s right,” Ben agreed. Then he thought of something, and his jaw dropped. “Whoa—what about when he saw you? Seeing you in person for the first time after so many years …”
“He acted very strange,” Sage admitted. “But … what do you mean ‘so many years’?”
“The pictures,” I said. “You’ve been showing up in my pictures all my life.”
“I have?” Sage looked at me wonderingly. “That’s very odd … because I’ve never seen you before today.”
I don’t know what I expected him to say, but it wasn’t that. I thought he’d be the one person who could explain the pictures. If he was as confused by them as I was, what did that mean? I stared into his eyes—was he lying? No—he looked genuinely amazed. I had no idea what to say, so I reached for something real.
“What happened next with my dad?” I asked.
“He said he knew how to help me retrieve the Elixir, and that we needed to speak to a ‘dark lady.’”
“A ‘dark lady’?” I asked dubiously. “That’s not how my dad would speak.”
“That’s what he said,” Sage maintained.
“Did he say where you’d find her?” Ben asked.
“No,” Sage said. “He just promised to take me to her. We made arrangements to meet the next day, in the Tijuca Forest.”
He turned to me. “I think your dad was afraid I wouldn’t show. He gave me his watch as a strange kind of reverse collateral. He said it was his most prized possession. He said he knew I was a good person, and I wouldn’t run off with something that meant so much to him.”
I smiled. That was my dad’s way: He always believed people lived up or down to the amount of trust you put in them.
“What happened? What went wrong?” Ben asked. “Why didn’t you guys go?”
“I don’t know,” Sage admitted. “He never showed. I thought maybe something had come up, so I went to the same spot at the same time the next day. And the next. For several days. Then I saw on the news that he’d disappeared, and I knew it wasn’t safe for me here anymore. I left the country.”
“That’s it?” I snapped. “You didn’t go to the police? You didn’t go to … oh, maybe my family?”
“I couldn’t put myself out there like that,” Sage said defensively. “I couldn’t have the attention.”
“How dare you? We’re talking about my dad’s life! If you’d told us about these groups, we could have spent the last year going after them! He could be alive right now!”
“You’re assuming he’s not,” Sage said.
&n
bsp; I opened my mouth to retort, then snapped it shut as I realized the import of his words.
“You think my father’s still alive?”
“I think it’s very likely. To get the Elixir, either group needs both what Grant knows and what I know. Unless Grant was foolish enough to give them his information, he’s still alive.”
“Wait,” Ben said. “If whichever group needed you both, why did they just kidnap him? Why didn’t they wait until you were together in the forest?”
“Grant must have realized they were following him, so he changed the plans. He probably thought it would keep us both safe, but instead they decided to strike and at least get him. As you saw this morning … they’re still after me.”
“So you think he’s alive.” I almost hated to think it. I wanted it so badly. The idea that my dad could actually be alive—even if he was hurt, even if he’d been tortured … it felt like too much to hope for.
“So what do we do?” I asked. “How can we find my father?”
“And the Elixir of Life,” Ben added.
“There is no Elixir of Life,” I said.
“Yes, there is,” Ben and Sage chorused.
“No, there isn’t. And even if there were, I wouldn’t care unless it helped me find my father.”
“Which it might,” Sage said.
Ben and I both wheeled to face him.
“How?” I asked.
“We take the trip I was supposed to take with Grant. We find the dark lady. She’ll help us get the Elixir. That’s what whoever has your father wants. We get that, we have the ultimate bargaining chip.”
“But we don’t know who or where this lady is,” Ben said.
“Dad would have figured it out before he came down here to tell Sage, right?” I said. “That means he worked on it at home. You know how he wrote everything down and kept all his research. I bet somewhere in the house there’s some kind of information about what he had planned.”
Ben turned to Sage. “Okay. So all Clea and I need is for you to tell us what you know about the Elixir, and we can go get it. You won’t ever have to see us again.”
“Not possible,” Sage said. “I said it before; you’ve been tied to me. That means you’re in danger. I don’t think you get that.”