Get a grip. Pretend this is a corporate party or a political function back on Earth.
Most couples were engaging in conversations, and by remaining silent, they would stick out. The socializing was up to her. She was an expert at small talk. The planet shouldn’t matter.
Vivianne spoke to the couple behind them. “Beautiful night for a party.”
The elderly woman peered through her glasses and frowned. “What’s so beautiful about it?”
There was no weather underground, but Vivianne forced herself to sound happy as she recovered from her slight error. “Aren’t you excited to be here?”
“I suppose.” But the woman sounded bored and turned to speak with the couple on her other side. There was whispering and several odd looks thrown at Vivianne.
Fitting in was harder than she’d imagined. Undaunted, Vivianne held her chin high.
From across the room, she caught a man staring at her. Something was strange about one of his eyes. The light caught his iris, and the hair on the back of her neck rose. He had an artificial eye, which shouldn’t bother her, but for some reason a chill shot down her spine. She had no idea why she was reacting to his stare and angled to take a better look. He was about halfway between her height and Jordan’s and dressed in dark purple. He carried himself like royalty, his bearing haughty. She caught only a glimpse, because the group of fawning women who surrounded him suddenly closed in around the man.
“Jordan, you done?”
He sighed. “There’s a lot of people here.”
She nudged him. “Try to hit the guy over there in royal purple.”
Jordan turned. “Which guy?”
She discreetly glanced to where she’d last seen him. “He’s gone.”
How had he disappeared so fast? And did his vanishing act have anything to do with them?
“Something’s wrong.” Jordan pulled her by the hand and threaded through the crowd to a side door.
A security guard immediately stepped in front of them. Jordan did one of his mental tricks to freeze the man, and they sidestepped and headed into the street.
The artificial sun had been replaced with artificial moonlight. The air was humid and dank. Jordan merged into a shadow and kneeled. She thought he needed to tie his shoe. Instead he ripped off the bottom of her gown.
He stood, took her hand again. “Run.”
She hated running when she had no idea what was going on, but she didn’t dare question him, not when he’d used that serious voice he saved for emergencies. Her pulse pounded as her feet slapped the pavement. While Jordan seemed to know exactly where he was going and she saw no sign of pursuit, she still felt like a fox with the hounds nipping at her heels.
He zipped down an alley, zagged through an empty playground, and backtracked twice. They sprinted past a shopping center into a residential area, through several yards, and over a footbridge.
Her lungs burned, but finally he slowed. “We’ve lost them.”
“Did you get what you needed?” she asked between giant gulps of air.
“Maybe.” He steered her onto the sidewalk.
“Care to explain?” She tried to keep the petulance from her voice. She’d never liked being kept in the dark. Without information, she couldn’t make good decisions, and if she couldn’t make good decisions, she wasn’t in control.
“Trendonis was in that room.” He spoke as if choosing his words with care. As if he didn’t have every reason to hate the man.
She knew better. Jordan controlled his deep emotions by shutting down his anger and hatred of the man who’d destroyed his world.
“You think Trendonis was the man I saw? The man with the artificial eye…” Sweet stars. “The eye you pecked out when you were helping Arthur to leave Pendragon?” The years hadn’t been kind to the Trendonis she’d seen destroy Dominus in Jordan’s memories. Years of cruelty had aged his face, hardened him.
“That was him.” Jordan kept walking through a path along a creek.
“But you didn’t see him. His face looked different from the one I saw in your memories.”
“Trendonis is known for using many names and disguises, but I got just a hint of his thoughts before he closed them off.”
She sucked in a deep breath. “Are you saying you couldn’t read him?”
“Something blocked me. Too much alcohol or drugs.”
She shook her head. “I saw his eyes. Trust me, that man can think like a computer.”
“Yeah, his intelligence is off the charts.” Jordan crossed a bridge. “The hartog’s house… that was Trendonis’s home. And the Grail’s there. I managed to pick up that much before Trendonis shut me down.”
“Why do you choose your words so carefully when you speak of the Tribe leader?”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps it’s the only way to control my hatred.” He took her hand and squeezed. “My father worked for the Dominus Defense Department, and he and his coworkers specialized in maintaining a planetary shield that could stop the weapons that destroyed Dominus. I wasn’t supposed to speak about his work to anyone. But in a casual comment I mentioned to a friend that my father worked on the Hill.”
“The Hill?”
“A nickname for his job location. Like your CIA calls their headquarters the Farm.” Jordan gathered his thoughts. “Anyway, after that comment, it wasn’t difficult for the Tribes to follow my father to work, infiltrate the Hill, and turn off the planetary defense system.”
“So you link that casual comment to the destruction of your world?”
“Trendonis was my best friend. I should have suspected. I should have known he wasn’t who he claimed.” He held her gaze a moment too long, then turned away, plainly unwilling to reveal any more of his guilt.
“How could you know?” she asked, softly, stunned he’d carried this burden for so long.
Her tenderness only seemed to make him be harder on himself. “Because I overheard him send a transmission once. And when I questioned him about it, he told me he was simply sending messages to the stars, hoping someone would hear him. And fool that I was, I believed him.”
“Of course you believed him. He was your friend.”
She raised her hand to her mouth, her mind swirling at the implications. No wonder Jordan’s determination to stop Trendonis had burned for centuries. Trendonis had befriended him, used him, and then destroyed his world.
“How did you and Trendonis meet?” she asked, realizing that for Jordan to feel such guilt, he had to feel responsible.
“At school. I suspect he was much older than he led me to believe.”
“So he took advantage of your youth.”
“Youth is not an excuse for stupidity,” Jordan replied.
She ached for his loss, his pain. To carry that burden on his shoulders for centuries was too much for any man to bear. A man with less inner strength might have given up, gone mad. But Jordan had fought at King Arthur’s side against the Tribes, and although they’d defeated them soundly, it wasn’t enough. Jordan wouldn’t be satisfied until Trendonis was stopped for good.
Even if Jordan succeeded, would he ever forgive himself? Would he be able to stop punishing himself and allow himself some happiness?
She wasn’t thinking straight. If Jordan succeeded in uniting the Staff and the Grail, he would die. For him, the grim reality of success was death.
Still, she wished to ease his pain. “Jordan, you made a mistake anyone could make. But even if you hadn’t mentioned your father’s line of work, Trendonis would have found another way to ruin Dominus. It was an accident that he used your slip up against your world.”
“That’s true.” His voice was angry, sad, and hard. “But it’s still a stain on my soul. All those billions of lives winked out in one giant flash of light. All of them dead. What the Tribes cannot dominate, they destroy.” Jordan’s eyes blazed.
“Now they’re after Earth.” She squeezed his hand, and for the first time since
they’d landed on Pentar, she felt strength and a certainty of purpose flowing through her. “We’re going to find the Grail and stop him.”
Don’t let someone become a priority in your life when you are just an option in their life. Relationships work best when balanced.
—QUEEN MARISA
36
Stop him? Jordan would have liked nothing better than to kill the son of a bitch. But he couldn’t risk losing the Grail for the personal satisfaction of seeing Trendonis dead.
Vivianne must have sensed his banked rage. “What’s wrong?”
He turned the conversation to a new concern. “Trendonis shut me out back there, and if it wasn’t drugs or alcohol, I’d love to know how he did it.”
Vivianne walked beside him. “You think it’s a natural ability, or some kind of artificial force field?”
“At first Trendonis was open to me.”
“That’s when you saw the Grail in his mind?” she asked.
He nodded. “Just as I skimmed the surface, Trendonis snapped up the barrier.”
“So he felt you in his head?”
“Or his mental blocks rise automatically and naturally, or…”
“Or he has a device that can shut you down?”
“It’s possible. He spent enough time on my world. The adults would have known about his plan to destroy us unless Trendonis had had a way to hide his thoughts.”
“None of these other people on Pentar have shown any indication of possessing a mental shield, have they?”
“No.” Something niggled in the back of Jordan’s mind. “Actually, I have encountered that kind of shield before.”
“Really?”
“Back on Arcturus, Arthur was also totally unreadable. At the time, I was still unskilled and didn’t know I could read almost everyone’s minds.”
“You assumed you could read me because of the blue lights?”
“Yes. But now I’m thinking that Arthur must have had the same kind of shield as Trendonis.”
Vivianne squeezed his hand as they turned a corner. “Doesn’t it seem odd to you that Arthur and Trendonis both have the same technology or same genetic trait?”
“It’s as suspicious as blue hell.”
“Blue hell?”
“A Dominus expression for—” Jordan pulled her into the shadows. “Sh.”
Vivianne stood quietly as a squad of Security passed by, their lights sweeping the sidewalks. Jordan perused their minds as the vehicle passed. The low-level operatives were only following orders to patrol the sector, and he picked up nothing useful.
“We’re almost there,” he whispered. “Let’s hurry.”
Trendonis’s mansion loomed in the moonlight, and Jordan paused to sweep the interior. “A maid’s sleeping in the chamber over the garage. Two men and the hartog are in a secret room that connects to Trendonis’s home office.”
“Are there alarms?” Vivianne peered through the landscaped back yard to the double glass doors that overlooked a patio at the rear of the house.
“Trendonis will have a security system.”
“What about the hartog?” Vivianne reminded him.
“It’s dreaming about running free.”
“Can you read insects and birds, too?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Maybe. Why?” He braced for a sarcastic comment. He didn’t have to read her mind to know his new self made her uneasy.
“We could use a lookout.”
Her practicality made him grin. It wouldn’t hurt to tap into the wildlife. But as he sent his mind outward, to his surprise, he encountered nothing. “Either I can only read higher life forms, or there’s no wildlife.”
“Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any birds,” she murmured as they crossed the patio toward the back doors. Then she stopped, pointed, and whispered, “See those wires? Give me a minute and I’ll disconnect the alarm.”
Vivianne was sophisticated and educated. She was so polished and independent, he tended to forget that she had street skills, too. That she’d been able to pick a lock since childhood.
She pulled a multitool from a hidden compartment in her handheld. “This should work.”
It took her less than twenty seconds to disable the alarm.
“Good work.” He reached for the door.
She pulled him back. “Not so fast.”
“What?”
“That was too easy. We’re talking about the Holy Grail. If Trendonis is as smart as you say, he’ll have motion detectors, hidden surveillance cameras, audio and infrared warning devices, possibly temperature sensors, too. I’m betting there’s a transmitter nearby, and I need to disable it before we move in.”
“Hold on a sec.” He scanned the guards’ minds. “The guards don’t know anything,” he reported, “but a few months ago, one of them noted a suspicious box on the roof. When he went to investigate, he was told to stay away, that it was for Trendonis’s communications with his spaceships.”
“Call me impressed.” Vivianne headed toward a tree with thick branches that would allow an easy climb to the roof. “You pulled out all that in just a few seconds?”
Jordan gave her a boost up to the first branch. “The guards are worried.”
“Why?” Vivianne scampered up the tree.
“Trendonis put them on alert.”
“That’s not good.” Vivianne pulled herself onto the roof.
By the time he climbed up beside her, she’d already picked the lock on the box. She shined a tiny penlight inside. Light reflected back on her face. Eyes focused, she traced several wires. “More bad news.”
“What’s wrong?”
“If I cut this wire, it automatically sends an alarm.”
“No problem. I can follow the signal. Whoever receives it will take a nap.”
She didn’t hesitate. She snipped two wires and disconnected a third. Jordan let his mind flow with the signal, curious where it would lead. Trendonis was using a private security firm. Interesting choice. Apparently he didn’t trust the local authorities or the military.
Jordan put the man to sleep and withdrew. “We’re good to go. You ready?”
“Have you taken care of the guards inside?”
“Not yet. I want to wait until the last moment in case Trendonis calls to check in.”
“Good idea.” Vivianne climbed down the tree and jumped the last few feet, landing like a cat on the back deck and making almost no sound.
He swung down behind her, expecting to land in the dark. Instead, spotlights shot on, blinding him from half a dozen angles.
Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
37
Vivianne swore. She’d disconnected the entire alarm system, but she’d forgotten the lights. Not part of the alarm, these lights were simply there for convenience. Nevertheless, she and Jordan no longer had the element of surprise.
Stomach dancing up her throat, she lunged toward a window, knocked out a pane of glass, unlatched the lock, and climbed through. Jordan followed.
From deep inside the mansion, she heard the hartog making noises that sounded like a seal barking. Jordan sprinted past her and straight down a hallway lined with photographs. Adrenaline pumping, she raced after him.
Rounding a corner, she sped straight through an elaborate office with a huge desk, polished steel cabinets, and several bronzed sculptures. Skidding to a halt on the slick granite floor, she almost bumped into Jordan, who had halted to press his ear to the door.
A chill of fear swept over her. Why wasn’t he scanning ahead with his mind?
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I’ve knocked out the guards, but the hartog isn’t susceptible to my power.”
Vivianne glanced around the office. A clear jar with blue twigs inside caught her eye. She grabbed it, twisted open the lid, and smelled. Hartog treats?
She couldn’t be certain. The sticks might be breath mints or decoration
or medicine. “Open the door.”
Jordan cracked it, and from inside, the hartog whined. Just before the animal pounced, she tossed a handful of the blue twigs inside. The hartog snorted, crunched, and slurped happily, and she grinned.
Jordan pulled his blaster and reopened the door. The hartog paid no attention to them—he was too busy scarfing down his treats. Beyond the munching hartog, two guards sprawled on the floor, out cold thanks to Jordan.
Vivianne followed him inside and gasped. Antiquities from every age, planet, and race decorated the high-ceilinged room. Surreal paintings, beautifully proportioned statues, sculpted objects, and delicate carvings in wood, stone, and meteorite decorated this windowless inner sanctum.
The place of honor was reserved for a white granite pedestal. Atop the pedestal perched a large cup with graceful handles.
“The Holy Grail?” she asked, her tone filled with awe.
Jordan nodded and reached for the Grail.
“Wait.” She knocked his hand back. “Check the guards’ minds. See if this thing’s triggered to go off when the Grail’s weight is removed.”
Jordan stilled, checking the men, then shook his head. “No. We’re safe.”
At the sight of his careful handling of the sacred chalice, both sadness and happiness flooded her.
They’d found the Holy Grail.
The healing cup that might save Earth.
The instrument of Jordan’s death.
He stood still, mesmerized by the smooth metal. His eyes glinted with triumph.
One of the guards groaned, reminding her that more could arrive any moment. “Jordan. We should go.”
The light in Jordan’s eyes hardened to a bright glint. “It’s a fake.”
“What?” She spun around so fast she almost tripped.
An awful sinking sensation engulfed her. Had they come all this way for nothing? “How do you know it’s not real?”
“The Grail contains a rippling energy field that’s visible to the naked eye.”
She stared at the cup. “Maybe it’s in the dormant stage.”
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