Sleight of Hand: Book Three: The Weir Chronicles

by Sue Duff

  The Primary’s guard fell in behind Dr. Mac and they disappeared down the hall.

  Falcon escorted Dr. Mac home and never returned. The Primary didn’t sequester Ian and Tara, probably in hopes that Ian would lead them to Eve.

  Nothing eased Ian’s guilt. Tara needed to release her own demons and chose to take what happened on the Sigrar Twal out on him in the gym. Ian welcomed the physical pain, unable to extinguish the emotional and mental anguish.

  Ian had never seen her so full of unbridled rage. She came at him with a primal scream and kept swinging her sword, abandoning all protocol, like a wild, crazed animal.

  Spent, Tara’s sword clanged against the gym floor, and she fell to her knees. Ian gathered her up in his arms. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he moaned until he had no breath left and his voice silenced. She went limp beneath his embrace, unable or unwilling, to lift her arms in response.

  Ian left her slumped in the middle of the gym and shyfted to his room. He showered amidst racing thoughts about how to connect with Dr. Mac in secret. One thing was for certain, the tracking chip would be left behind.

  When Ian stepped out of the shower, he hesitated. The steam had revealed a hand-scrawled message on his mirror.

  What’s in a name?

  He walked up and stared at it through his reflection. Had Dr. Mac left a clue?

  The odor of baking bread filled Ian’s bedroom, and a tray of warm rolls sat on his bed. He threw some clothes on and found Milo in the kitchen kneading a massive mound of dough, releasing his frustrations in a cloud of flour, creating rolls that no one would have the appetite to eat.

  The caretaker slammed a fist into the dough and didn’t remove it. “Don’t take Tara,” he said.

  “What are talking about?” Ian settled on the stool across from him.

  “I know Mac left you a message. I saw it when I went to check on you.”

  “Do you know what it means?” Ian said.

  “Not a clue. The Primary’s guard watched him like a hawk when he came to patch you up. Mac must have done it when he turned his back for a second.”

  “Why not tell me outright? Why make me guess at its meaning?”

  “In case the bastard followed him into the bathroom when he took a piss! Hell I don’t know how that old coot’s brain works half the time.” Milo stirred the contents of his boiling pot, but the spoon slipped, disappearing into the boiling liquid. He leaned against the counter. “Mac’s in this up to his ass, isn’t he?”

  “He’s never come out and admitted it, but I think he’s—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Milo snapped. A second later, the old caretaker fished his wooden spoon out of the pot. “Maybe you both still believe you can fix this, but there’s been enough spilt blood to fill that lake out there. Tara’s won’t be added. You hear me?” Milo said.

  “She won’t forgive me.” Ian looked at him. “She’ll hate us both.”

  He grunted. “Better her wrath, than eternal silence.”

  “Take Saxon,” Ian said. The wolf raised his head and whined. I don’t know where I’m going, or for how long, Ian channeled. I need you to protect them until I can return. Ian slid off the stool. “It’s not safe here, not anymore.”

  “I’ve got us some options that the Syndrion don’t know about.” Milo separated a glob of dough and rolled the sticky ball between his hands. “But we’ll have to figure out a way to communicate that they can’t track.”

  “Destroy Tara’s cell phone. I think that’s how they’ve been tracking us.” Ian glanced toward the hallway. “Do the boys know about Marcus?” Ian said.

  “Tara told them.”

  “I need them to help me figure out the clue,” Ian said.

  “They’re asleep in the great room. Why those two prefer couches and chairs over the beds upstairs is beyond me. Get them up. It’s past five in the afternoon.” Milo pulled a tray of golden-crusted rolls from the oven and took a whiff. “They can’t go home,” he said. “Without Marcus’s protection, the Syndrion will torture them to find out where you’ve gone.”

  “I know.” Ian followed the amber glow of a virtual screen into the great room.

  What’s in a name? Ian stood, staring at the floating data while trying to decipher Dr. Mac’s cryptic clue. He walked around the columns, as if looking at it backward, then forward again would somehow bring it into perspective.

  Ian scratched along his jaw. Something about the names. “Xander!”

  A snort came from the couch behind him. Pacman had curled up in the chair.

  “What?” Xander said and rubbed his eyes. He sat up and gave into a silent, wide yawn that wiggled one ear.

  “How do I rearrange the data?” Ian asked. He poked at one of the words and its pixels dispersed, then corrected themselves.

  “Here.” Xander hunted and pecked something out on his laptop with one hand while ruffling his hair with the other. Several key strikes later, he leaned back. “Have at it.”

  “Did you save what was up here?”

  “Does a sunbathing chimp use banana oil?”

  Ian hesitated, unsure how to respond, but Xander indicated to go ahead with a backhanded wave. Ian pinched the floating pixels, but they dispersed between his fingers.

  “It’s not grab and squeeze,” Xander said on the heels of a shrill yawn. “Think of a touch screen on a tablet. Just use the tip of your finger and drag it to where you want.”

  It took a bit of practice, but Ian soon got the hang of it. He separated all of the proper nouns into two columns, one for the company names, and the other with the product names. Then created a column for the women’s first names, and another for last names. He stood back and studied the four columns.

  What’s in a name? He mulled over the clue, but the longer he stared, the warmer his core grew, and gusts of wind rattled the windows. He walked away and paced behind the couch. What’s in a name?

  “Hell, those two are gobblygoop to me,” Xander said, wiggling fingers at the foreign companies and international product columns. His mumbled attempt at pronouncing the Maltese shipping company name ended in garbled sounds. Ian lobbed the correct pronunciation at him from over his shoulder. Xander then tried the name of the whiskey, but Pacman spoke up from under a curtain of sleepy eyelids and pronounced it correctly. “I looked that one up,” he added.

  “What does it mean?” Xander said lying down on the couch. He threw his arm over his eyes.

  “Long trees,” Pacman said, stretching out in all directions over the rolling arms of the chair. A second later, he went limp like a rag doll. “Why would anyone name a gut-burning drink after trees?”

  “Whiskey is made from trees?” Xander asked from under his arm. “I’m sticking with beer.”

  Pacman shushed his underage drinking confession.

  “It’s made from a variety of grains,” Ian said. Pacman opened one eye and turned it toward Ian. “That’s what I found when I got there,” Ian said without breaking a step.

  “Seems stupid calling it long trees.” Xander rolled over, pressing his face into the couch cushion. “Wouldn’t it be tall trees,” he mumbled.

  Ian’s steps came to an abrupt halt. He stared at the list while his thoughts scrambled to open and dust off drawers of old lessons, rapidly applying the multiple languages he’d learned from his years growing up in Europe.

  A pattern emerged at the same time a chill coursed through his limbs. The truth stared him in the face. It was here all along. There had been no need to track the rebel leader across the globe. Ian sank to the arm of the couch. He’d wasted so much time on a goose chase of his own making.

  He knew where to look for Patrick, but even more disturbing—he knew who Eve was.

  {48}

  Ian grabbed a picture of Patrick and his mother, taken at their estate in the Hamptons. The Langtrees had residences all over the world, but Ian had never visited any of them. Patrick never cared to. The photo was all that Ian had as a starting point until the boys could get him
addresses if the Hampton residence came up empty.

  He set the photo on the foyer table, focused on a location, and shyfted to the spot depicted in the image. Ian appeared on the back patio where its concrete railing attached to the back of the house.

  It was after 10:00 p.m. on the east coast, and the chatter of katydids greeted him. At the hoot of an owl, Ian looked up and counted five smokestacks along the expansive roof. His heart sank when he peered through the window and didn’t find lights on; only ghostly sheets covering the furniture. It struck him as odd there were no security lights outside or, from what he could tell, inside. Were there motion detectors?

  Ian took the chance and shyfted inside the great room, but stood still, listening and searching for security cameras. Other than the rhythmic ticktock coming from a grandfather clock at the front of the house, the mansion slept.

  The boys were the only ones to know where Ian had gone. They were hiding out in Rayne’s neighborhood at a small rental bungalow with enough supplies, including licorice, gum, and gift cards for pizza delivery, to last a month or more. Ian was counting on them playing video games and to not sticking their heads out the door for weeks.

  He had wanted to spare Tara and Milo the truth. That JoAnna Langtree had duped them all. But if he were honest, it was pure selfishness, wanting the confrontation to be his alone. His head swam, unable to fathom that her answers could make sense of it. The woman he’d thought of as a surrogate mother had Ian tortured, burned alive from the inside out. How could she do that and still look him in the eye? At that instant a revelation hit him: she had been at the mansion when the Book of the Weir was stolen.

  Ian set out combing the downstairs. In almost every room, pieces of JoAnna’s past came to light. He discovered framed awards, letters of congratulations, and more than one diploma in the study. He was shocked to find that she graduated from Yale with an archeology degree. Patrick had never shared any of his parents’ lives with Ian. It struck him that there was nothing about his father on display anywhere. His parents had lived separate lives for decades.

  In the center of the study, a lanyard hung from an intricately carved sculpture depicting a mother wolf fending off a looming bear. The chiseled date on the side indicated it was from the fifteenth century. The statue was displayed prominently on a podium. He fingered the pass, out of place in an otherwise meticulous room. It felt like an invitation.

  He grabbed the lanyard and stuffed it into his pocket, then made his way up the winding staircase to check the bedrooms. When he stepped into the last one at the far end of the east wing, he paused and sniffed. Cleanser and furniture wax had permeated the house, but this odor was isolated to one bedroom.

  The scent led Ian to a bathroom where it was at its strongest inside the tub. He ran his finger along the inside and a purple crust came off on his finger. When he opened the medicine cabinet to check inside, a hand-scribbled message appeared on the opposite mirror. Ian closed the cabinet, and the message disappeared. He opened it again and realized that the moonlight’s reflection was what made it visible.

  Ian left the cabinet open and peered at the scrawled lines. The top word was smeared. He took the first letter to be a capital K and made out what he could only guess was the word, Kyre. The word below it was nearly intact and much clearer than the one above. Alive.

  He resumed his search, while mulling it over. It wasn’t a name from Rayne’s research. Was Dr. Mac here earlier? Was this another clue? Ian stopped in his tracks. Was the K really an R? His pulse quickened as he examined the word in his head. The r between the y and e could have been the letter n. Was the top word Rayne?

  Adrenaline fueled his legs. He searched the mansion more thoroughly, and chose to retrace some of his steps with renewed eyes. But his elation had fizzled by the time he reached the lowest level and discovered nothing that would get him one step closer to finding Eve. Ian didn’t get a signal in the cement basement, so he returned to the back patio and called the boys using the burner phone. Pacman picked up.

  “Whoa, Tara’s turned psycho,” Pacman said. “It’s kinda sexy.”

  “She isn’t e-mailing you to get a date,” Xander shouted from nearby. “She’s figured out that we helped the Heir.” Scuffling. Xander’s voice grew louder. “But you’re our bro and our lips are sealed.”

  “Promise me you’ll get me a date with her,” Pacman yelled. “Once you save the world and all!”

  “Where am I going next?” Ian said over an explosion in the background. He hoped it was coming from a video game.

  “You would think that billionaires would have a slew of palaces, but if they do, they’re not in their names,” he said. Xander popped his bubble gum close by. Squealing tires, muted shouts.

  He fingered the pass in his pocket. “Try cross-referencing the women’s names with residences. And add Kyre to the list.”

  “Already on it,” Pacman said. “We’ll keep you posted.”

  “We’ve got your back, fearless leader—” the call ended, cutting off Xander’s parting words.

  Ian pulled the pass from his pocket and looked the museum up on his cell, found the address and business hours, then shyfted to Denver, Colorado. The mountain time zone was a couple of hours earlier than New York and the hustle and bustle of late-evening downtown traffic filled the air. Ian stepped out from behind the sign at the entrance and peered through the glass front doors. Security lights lit up hallways beyond the lobby where a towering T-rex skeleton stood to greet patrons with a toothy snarl. The museum had been closed for more than an hour, but security might be doing a sweep.

  He shyfted behind a tall sign in the lobby and increased the electromagnetic energy in his core to wreak havoc with security cameras. He grabbed a map at the information counter, then hurried deeper into the museum, impressed by the displays and featured exhibits.

  Voices and the sound of a motor moving along the floor came from the second story. He pulled the pass from his pocket and studied it further. It struck Ian that JoAnna was significantly younger in the picture of her at the museum. Egyptian Studies was listed underneath her photo, and he wondered if an internship had brought her here decades earlier. Ian referred to his map and found the indicated hall. It took him by the minerals exhibit where dim lights glinted off of milky quartz the size of a knight’s shield and an amethyst bigger than his fist.

  Ian stepped into the Egyptian exhibit at the end of the hall and came to a halt. JoAnna stood in the middle of the room, looking down at a mummy lying in a glass case.

  Patrick’s mother didn’t look up. “She had the most contagious laugh. I made sure she found a good home.” She planted a two-finger kiss on the glass case, just over the mummy’s face. “Hello, Ian.”

  “JoAnna,” Ian said. He glanced around and listened to the room. There were only two heartbeats, the racing one was his. He approached with caution. “Or would you rather I call you Eve?”

  “Eve, please.” A relaxed smile defined her lips and she rested her arms on the mummy case. “Did you enjoy learning about me? Patrick didn’t know I had a career as an archeologist before devoting myself to my new role as JoAnna Langtree. He had no idea that his socialite mother used to dig in the dirt, uncovering artifacts.” She looked at the mummy. “Friends, across the globe.” She rubbed the palm of one hand. “The calluses took their sweet time to fade.”

  “Where is he?” Ian demanded.

  “You’ll see him soon. I wanted a chat first.” She sat on a bench and patted the seat beside her. “Like old times.”

  Was she remembering their first encounter? Ian on a park bench beside a proud mother bragging about her son. She crouching down to smell the yellow roses before leaving the park.

  “We didn’t meet by chance, did we?”

  “I leave very little to chance,” Eve said.

  “You introduced Patrick into my life. Nurtured our relationship. Why?”

  “To keep friends close, and potential enemies, even closer.” She pursed her lips. “Yo
u and Patrick had to learn to work together, but more importantly, to trust one another. Given who you are and who he was to become, it was critical that you not be enemies.”

  “Why kidnap your own son?”

  “He needed to discover his path for himself. You couldn’t be a part of that.” She stood and approached. “But your destinies have always been entwined.” She locked her fingers together and pressed them into a fist. “Now, you must learn to work together as a team.”

  “We’ve always been a team, JoAnna.” Ian caught himself. “Eve. You never had faith in him, not like I did.”

  “You’re wrong, Ian. I’ve always known what Patrick was capable of.” A bright flash reflected in her pupils. Strong arms locked around him from behind and lifted him off his feet.

  “Play nice, boys,” Eve said.

  A frigid blast of magnetic energy engulfed him. The shyft robbed Ian’s gasp as the air sucked from his body. The second they appeared, an arctic shudder rippled through Ian and he was shoved onto a hardwood floor. He rolled onto his back and faced Jaered. “You bastard!”

  “Really, that’s the best you’ve got?” Jaered gave him a smirk. “I expected a lot worse.”

  Ian got to his feet. “You burned me up from the inside out!”

  “You got your payback, and then some!”

  It took a second for Ian’s thoughts to catch up to his rage. “Rayne. Is she all right?”

  “No, thanks to you.” Jaered flexed his shoulder. “After nearly killing her, I’d kiss that relationship good-bye.”

  Ian dropped his head and rammed it into Jaered’s abdomen, lifting him off his feet. He then fell on top of him, pummeling him with his fists.

  Jaered threw his arms up, blocking the worst of the blows, but suffering others. Blood splattered across the polished floorboards. He managed to wrap his legs around Ian. With a twist of his hips, he flipped Ian onto his back, then pinned his arms down. “You fight with your emotions. I’ve got my work cut out for me.”