Destiny

by A D Starrling

  That was when he saw the tiny figure in the doorway of the bedroom.

  Lily stood frozen in a psychic dream, her eyes wide and unseeing, her face deathly pale. His stomach lurched.

  Olivia’s voice rose dimly from his cell above the sudden pounding of his heart.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Lily whispered.

  The dog started barking downstairs.

  Lily blinked. ‘They’re here.’

  Awareness suddenly flooded her face. Lucas knew instantly that she’d awoken. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. He moved, the phone falling onto the sheets, the dial tone a distant echo as he rounded the bed.

  Lily raised a hand toward him, her blue eyes dark with horror. ‘No, daddy. Run!’

  ‘Lucas?’ Anna mumbled. She blinked and sat up abruptly when she saw their daughter.

  Tomas’s scream came a second before an explosion ripped through the house.

  The floor shook violently beneath Lucas. He stumbled and fell, plaster dust raining down around him. Fear twisted his heart. He climbed to his feet and lurched toward his daughter.

  The wall behind her tore open, wood cracking and splintering, a large section disappearing outward in an instant. A shadowy figure swooped down from the gaping, dark void beyond and grabbed the little girl around the waist.

  ‘Lily!’ Lucas shouted.

  Anna leapt out of their bed, her scream echoing his as he started to run.

  Lily’s eyes widened.

  Time slowed. Sound faded.

  His fingertips touched hers fleetingly.

  Then, she was gone.

  Lucas blinked, shock drenching his body in a cold sweat. A thumping noise reached his ears through the blood roaring inside his skull, the sound at once alien and familiar.

  He dashed to the edge of the yawning hole that had once been a guest bedroom and looked out wildly into the darkness. The din of helicopter rotors came a moment before he felt the downdraft of air. Bile flooded his throat when he saw the dark shapes in the starlit skies above him.

  There was no sign of Lily.

  Instinct had him bolting toward the children’s bedroom. He’d just cleared the stairs when a second explosion blasted through the back of the house and lifted him off his feet.

  Lucas’s breath locked in his throat as he slammed into a wall. His head struck the plaster hard. Stars exploded in front of his eyes. Tendons wrenched and tore in his right arm. He sagged to his knees, a buzzing sound filling his head while the world spun around him.

  ‘Lucas!’ Anna shouted somewhere behind him.

  ‘Stay back!’ he yelled.

  Lucas shook his head dazedly, gritted his teeth, and grabbed his dislocated shoulder as he straightened up. He staggered forward, unheeding of the debris slicing the soles of his bare feet, his heart racing with panic.

  A third explosion rocked the building as he negotiated the corridor to the children’s bedroom. He stumbled and kept moving. Black smoke billowed toward him. His stomach dropped. He turned the corner and stopped dead in his tracks, terror weakening his legs.

  Flames crackled and roared inside the room up ahead, an incandescent wall blocking his path.

  ‘Tomas!’

  Chapter Four

  Lucas ran and jumped through the fire. He cleared the flames, landed on debris, slipped, and fell onto his back. His breaths came in fast, harsh pants as he sat up and scanned the acrid fumes around him. His gaze froze on Tomas’s empty bed for a heartbeat before moving to the jagged opening occupying what had once been the south-facing wall of the house.

  He rose and staggered to the edge of the void.

  Harsh light suddenly blinded him from above. Lucas squinted and raised his left hand to his face. Ice filled his veins.

  Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw his son disappear up toward a second hovering Black Hawk helicopter.

  ‘Dad!’ Tomas screamed. The little boy kicked and struggled in the grip of a masked figure, hands reaching down helplessly.

  Lucas’s heart stuttered when he looked past the spotlight attached to the aircraft’s starboard skid and saw the other figure crouching inside the cabin.

  He sucked in air and dove to the side a second before bullets left the barrels of a rotary machine gun and peppered the space where he’d been standing. He landed on his dislocated shoulder with a harsh grunt, slid across the floorboards, and collided heavily with a chest of drawers.

  A distant crash came from elsewhere in the house. Bullets tore through the wall next to him.

  Lucas rolled onto his front and crawled toward the bedroom door in a cloud of splinters. Anger churned his stomach when he realized their assailants were using some kind of explosive, armor-piercing round. He struggled to his feet and jumped through the flames, the barrage of bullets and the spotlight following in his wake.

  Anna’s shout reached him from somewhere downstairs as he retraced his steps along the hallway. He negotiated the piles of rubble to their bedroom, grabbed his guns from the closet, and rammed a pair of spare magazines into the waistband of his pajamas before dashing back to the stairs. He took them two steps at a time, the Glock in his good hand. The sound of a scuffle reached him from the direction of the kitchen when he got to the bottom. He bolted toward the noise.

  Anna stood struggling with a masked figure by the patio doors, the daisho on the floor behind her; she must have retrieved it from his office. Their golden retriever growled angrily at her attacker’s feet, jaws firmly locked on the calf of the armed man and paws skidding on the floorboards as he tugged and fought to pull him off Anna. The cat crouched next to them, hairs rising from his arched back and angry hisses leaving his throat.

  Rage burned through Lucas. He strode across the floor and shot the man in the head. The intruder jerked and crumpled to the floor.

  A second figure darted out of the gloom behind Anna. He wrapped an arm around her throat and placed the barrel of a gun against her right temple.

  Lucas dropped the Glock, snatched a blade from the knife block on the island next to him, and hurled it.

  The blade spun through the air and thudded into the man’s right shoulder. He stumbled back with a grunt, his hold loosening on Anna. She snarled, elbowed him in the solar plexus, and grabbed his arm when he started to raise his gun.

  A single gunshot thundered across the room as Lucas bolted toward the struggling pair. A glass exploded on the counter to his left, fragments of the bullet tearing through the air and missing his skin by inches.

  The intruder’s eyes widened a second before Lucas’s fist collided with his jaw. He grunted and crashed into a patio door, the glass smashing under the impact.

  Lucas roared, kicked the gun from his hand, and kneed him in the gut.

  The man doubled over, the blow driving him through the jagged opening in the door frame. He fell out onto the veranda at the front of the house and landed on a jagged shard of glass, the fragment piercing his back all the way through his heart and out the front of his chest.

  ‘To your right!’ Anna shouted.

  Lucas glimpsed movement out the corner of his eye and ducked beneath the knife arcing toward his neck. He heard the slick slide of a sword being drawn and turned in time to see Anna cast his katana at him. He jumped, grabbed the lacquered handle mid-air, and twisted as he landed on his feet, the blade slicing up and across the third figure’s neck.

  The man froze, his hands rising to the crimson stream pouring from his severed artery and windpipe. A choked gurgle left his lips as he sagged to his knees and onto his front.

  Lucas moved to Anna’s first attacker and stabbed him in the heart, fury a red mist across his vision.

  Something told him these men were Immortals.

  He wanted to make sure they would not rise again.

  A noise at the front of the house brought his head around. His pulse jumped.

  Glass crunched outside as Anna’s second attacker climbed to his feet. He blinked, touched the glittering shard wedged in hi
s heart, and took a step toward them.

  A hand wrapped around Lucas’s left ankle, distracting him. He looked down and froze when he saw the man whose neck he’d cut attempt to rise to his knees.

  How is this—?

  Gunfire brought Lucas’s head up again.

  Anna had grabbed a gun off the floor and was walking out of the house, an incoherent cry of rage on her lips as she shot the man on the veranda point blank in the chest.

  Though he jerked and stumbled, he did not fall.

  Lucas’s heart thudded frantically as he drove the katana into the back of the intruder at his feet and straight through his heart. He yanked his blade out and turned in time to see two figures drop down from the sky and land on the veranda.

  They clipped a line to the body harness of the man facing Anna and shot back up with him in tow.

  She followed their ascent to the third Black Hawk hovering above the house with the gun, finger moving repeatedly on the trigger even after the magazine clicked empty.

  Lucas glimpsed movement in the aircraft’s cabin, lunged, and looped an arm around Anna’s waist. He carried her to the ground a heartbeat before a machine gun spat scores of rounds at the spot where she’d been standing.

  The first helicopter swung around the northwest corner of the house. The second whirled into view from the south. Spotlights pierced the darkness and shone down on them.

  Lucas scrambled to his knees in the downdrafts, pushed Anna behind him, and backpedaled furiously inside the house in a hail of automatic gunfire.

  Bullets smashed through the ground floor windows and walls of their home as the helicopters started circling the building. Lucas climbed to his feet, hauled Anna up, and broke into a run toward the foyer, his fingers clasped tightly around her wrist. She swooped and grabbed his Glock from the floor as they went past the kitchen island. An explosion ripped through the room just as they exited it.

  They darted toward the rear of the property in a cloud of debris and raced through to the sitting room. Lucas crossed the floor in a handful of steps, scaled a table against the opposite wall, and jumped, Anna in tow. They crashed through the large bay window at the back of the house.

  They landed in the dirt in a shower of shards and rolled. Further explosions rocked the house behind them. The dog yelped from somewhere inside.

  Lucas tumbled to a stop, pulled Anna up, and headed for the trees. A helicopter appeared to the right when they were ten seconds from cover. Fire flashed in the sky. His stomach dropped when he heard the whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade. He veered at the last moment.

  The bomb detonated some twenty feet to their right.

  A wave of hot air wrapped around them as the blast lifted them off the ground. The world tilted and spun wildly. Pain stabbed through Lucas’s left flank when he struck the dirt seconds later.

  He lay stunned for a moment, his breath locked in his throat. When air finally wheezed through his lips, he gasped and groaned, his frantic gaze seeking Anna. Coldness gripped him when he saw her lying unconscious to his left, a crimson wound at her temple.

  ‘Anna!’

  Her name echoed dimly in his skull, his shout drowned out by the buzzing in his ears.

  Lucas’s bones and teeth vibrated from the sudden thump-thump of helicopter rotors above him as he climbed unsteadily to his knees. Heat bloomed in his belly. He looked down and glimpsed the jagged piece of wood that had impaled his flesh. He gritted his teeth, crawled toward Anna, and rolled onto his back atop her, protecting her body with his.

  He looked up and faced their invisible enemy, his dislocated arm lying uselessly at his side while blood oozed from the tear in his abdomen.

  For a moment, the only sounds were the rhythmic beats of the spinning blades in the sky and the roar from the fires engulfing the house.

  Flames erupted from the mouth of a rocket launcher a hundred feet above him.

  Lucas clenched his jaw, knowing there was no escape and that this was something they were unlikely to survive.

  He reached out blindly, his fingers finding Anna’s in the gloom. He closed his eyes as the grenade arrowed in on them and quelled the fury consuming his heart while he brought to mind the faces of their children for the last time. Despair filled him in his final moment.

  I’m sorry I failed you.

  Light bloomed behind his eyelids.

  There was no heat. No pain. No sound.

  Only silence.

  Anna coughed and gasped.

  Lucas blinked, shocked. The fact that he was still alive had barely registered when he beheld the incredible sight above him.

  The flames of the detonation roared a short distance away, separated from them by some kind of transparent wall.

  Anna shifted beneath him and he removed his weight from her. She sat up slowly beside him.

  A second grenade left the helicopter hovering to their right. A third rocketed down from the aircraft to the left.

  Anna cried out, her fingers clenching around his.

  Lucas could only stare in wonderment, his breath frozen on his lips. Something told him the grenades would not reach them.

  The bombs exploded thirty feet from their noses. Fire spread and wrapped around the invisible bubble curving over the area where they lay, the sound of the detonations a distant rumble, the heat of the flames undetectable.

  That was when Lucas knew their children were still alive. He shared a dazed glance with Anna and saw the same shocking realization dawn in her eyes.

  Even though Tomas and Lily were in the hands of an unknown enemy and no doubt scared out of their minds, they had still protected them.

  There was no other explanation for what they were witnessing.

  The helicopters suddenly started spinning wildly in the sky.

  Lucas stiffened. Anna drew a sharp breath.

  He understood instinctively then that an unseen battle was taking place above them. They watched for breathless moments, powerless to help.

  The aircrafts leveled out, whirled around sharply, and headed for the ocean.

  Something flashed out of the last helicopter when it passed over the yacht moored at the pier. Though he didn’t hear the blast, Lucas saw the explosion. The boat went up in flames. He stared at the dark shapes fading rapidly in the night, his heart sinking.

  Ripples broke out across the dome of energy insulating them from the outside world, the flames from the grenades long doused. It dissipated a moment later.

  The thunderous roar of the blaze engulfing their home washed over them.

  Chapter Five

  ‘We got visual yet?’ Asgard snapped.

  He checked his twin-barreled Colt revolvers and slipped spare magazines into the ammunition pouch at his waist, his shoulders rigid.

  Howard Titus’s fingers danced across the master keyboard of the main workstation of the computer lab.

  ‘No.’ He studied the bank of flat-screen monitors in front of him. ‘We should have images from the NGA in the next six minutes.’

  They were in a steel and concrete reinforced bunker half a mile beneath a sprawling, state-of-the-art mansion that occupied the crest of a hill, in the middle of some three hundred and fifty acres of prime real estate in the Santa Monica Mountains.

  The property stood on the same site as the first mansion Howard, Ethan, and Asgard had built following the incredible success of STAEGH Corp, the multi-billion-dollar tech company they had formed using the money they’d accumulated over the centuries of their existence.

  The original building and bunker had been destroyed four years back following a deadly assault by Jonah Krondike’s men and the US Army group who had been helping him experiment on humans and Immortals. It was Howard himself who had activated the detonator on the network of explosives with which they’d rigged the property for use in the event of such a catastrophic scenario.

  Though it would have made sense to reconstruct the new estate elsewhere, Olivia had insisted they rebuild on the original grounds. It was th
e only home she’d known beside the abbey where she’d spent the first hundred years of her life.

  The second mansion was even more secure than the first, with the cave holding the computer lab deeper than its predecessor and able to withstand the latest bunker bomb.

  Olivia glanced at the figure emerging from the armory at the back of the chamber. Madeleine holstered a gun and swung a rucksack onto her shoulder, her face set in grim lines. She came and placed it on the workstation where Ethan was checking a duffel bag filled with medical kit.

  Even though they had taught her how to use a gun and given her a firearm, Olivia still disliked using the weapon. She much preferred exercising her psionic abilities to defeat an enemy over riddling them with explosive, metal projectiles.

  Asgard shoved his arming sword into the scabbard strapped to his back and turned to a second monitor on the workstation. ‘Victor? Anything from your end?’

  Victor Dvorsky was on video call from the headquarters of the Bastian First Council in Vienna.

  He looked away from the person he’d been giving orders to and faced the camera.

  ‘We have two satellites covering the Pacific right now. We should have live feeds in sixty seconds.’ His expression reflected the same disquiet running through all of them.

  ‘Has anyone been able to get in touch with them?’ Alexa said in a hard voice across another video call.

  She was on a private jet headed for LAX with Zachary and Reid.

  ‘No.’ A muscle jumped in Ethan’s cheek. ‘Not since Olivia got through just after six this morning.’

  ‘What about the phone in Anna’s lab?’ Reid said across the connection.

  Lines furrowed the former US Marine’s brow, visible in the dimmed light of the airplane cabin.

  Madeleine shook her head. ‘We tried that too. No luck so far.’

  ‘Their satellite dish is down,’ Howard said. ‘I haven’t been able to get any signal from it since we started checking.’

  ‘Olivia, have you tried remote-viewing the island?’ Conrad asked on another monitor.

  He and Laura were making their way back to the West Coast from Rio de Janeiro, where they’d been visiting friends.