Some kind of emotion flickered across Jacken’s face. She couldn’t tell what it was, and then it was gone.
“So I, uh ….” She swallowed thickly, and pulled her eyes away, unable to bear the intensity of his dark gaze anymore. “I went out into my back yard one day and gathered a bag of small rocks and pebbles, then spread them under the sheets in my bed.” She half shrugged. “I guess I figured that maybe if I punished myself severely enough, my father would somehow know how sorry I was and come back.
“God, I must’ve slept on those rocks for a good week before my mother discovered them and went bonkers. Well, she stayed calm on the outside, but she sent me to a child psychologist all the same. I don’t remember much about those sessions, except there were a lot of puppets involved.” She laughed humorlessly. “But I suppose in the end I came to realize my father’s departure wasn’t my fault.”
She turned to him again, her throat working convulsively as she looked at Jacken’s tattoos. “What you experienced was so much worse than what I went through. I know that. I don’t mean to invalidate your dreadful experiences. I just … I know what it’s like to live a childhood feeling pretty lost.”
His face remained absolutely still, not a single muscle moving, bones set in place. Only the rhythmic flexing of his hands at his sides revealed that he wasn’t made of stone. Except for his heart, that is.
She took a single step backward on unsteady legs, feeling exposed down to the depths of her soul. Why in the world had she let some weird, disturbing – and, please God, temporary – connection with this man inspire her to regurgitate the most agonizing experience of her childhood? He had about as much ability to respond to her pain as a 2x4.
“I’ll leave you to your shower now.” She practically sprinted for the door.
“Start dating your mate-choices.”
She froze with her hand on the knob, astonished that he’d spoken to her.
His voice was as gritty as a rusted out 10-speed. “They’ll … I think one of them could make you very happy, a kind of happy you’ll never find topside, Toni, and … you deserve it.”
A choking lump of emotion lodged in her throat. Unable to speak, she pulled open the door and hurried out. Once inside her own room, she crossed to her bed and crumpled down onto the mattress. Tears gathered in her eyes as emptiness swept over her like a cold wind, spreading numbness through her extremities. She wanted to run; run down the hall; run out of this building; run back home and throw herself into her brother’s arms and never let go.
She hugged her middle and looked around the room with bleary eyes. This wasn’t her room. She didn’t belong here. She’d spent a week straight in this rotten bedroom and had never felt as alone and out of place as she did now.
A kind of happy you’ll never find topside, Toni.
Damn that man. Gulping a breath, she scooted over to the French Contessa phone on her nightstand and picked up the receiver.
There was the usual soft hum. “Operator.”
“Yes, this is Dr. Toni Parthen. I’d like to speak to Mr. Roth Mihnea, if I may.”
A single tear traced a path to her jaw. She’d start dating, all right. Her mate-choices were warriors, and somehow, damn it, she was going to finagle a key card off one, and then get the hell out of this place.
Chapter Thirteen
Alex absently strummed his guitar, the instrument feeling like an old friend in his hands. He hadn’t played in a while, not since his band’s bass player had gone into treatment for colon cancer, if four computer geeks could even be called a band. Toni had given him this guitar for Christmas years ago: a handmade mahogany/spruce Sorbera acoustic. He’d just about killed her for going so over budget that year, but she’d wanted to encourage his music, seeing real talent in what to him had just been another rebellion: his electric guitar rocker phase.
He picked out the first few chords of Hotel California as he gazed at his computer with enough force to bore a hole through the screen. He was seated stiffly on the edge of the couch in his office, the light of a dying sun filtering in through the west facing window, coloring the room a mellow gold. The ice in an untouched gin and tonic chinked softly on the table next to him. On the computer monitor, the mouse cursor blinked where he’d left it stalled out on Toni’s latest email, or actually the email from whoever was pretending to be her.
He was absolutely sure now that whoever was sending those emails wasn’t his sister. The emails sounded almost like her to anyone who didn’t know Toni as well as he did, but it all came down to the fact that over a week had gone by and Toni still hadn’t called or given him any contact information. No way would Toni keep him out of the loop this long. He and his sister were just too close these days. They’d always been tight, even as kids, but in the last few months – hell, years – with neither of them dating much or going out with friends, they’d really come to rely on each other for big time sanity checks. For companionship. A couple of days without calling was pushing it. A week was…impossible.
Alex and Detective Waterson had been working the fake Toni theory together, but the detective wasn’t having any luck running down information. Neither was Alex, for that matter; just as he’d predicted, that forged IP address was proving impossible to trace.
He’d been attacking the problem with his best stuff, too. The moment Waterson and his partner had driven off seven days ago, Alex had brought his no-no hacker programs out of mothballs and reinstalled them: sniffer, crack, malicious logic, cryptographic checksum, DNS and IP spoofing, daemons. He’d been sending emails to Fake Toni ever since, with various Trojans attached to try and probe out system information, but whoever was working on Toni’s end had access control encrypted tighter than a virgin’s honey pot. Just when Alex would manage to follow a signal a few steps, the footprints would cross a stream, so to speak, then just vanish. He knew they were there, but hell if he could see them.
Damn, but he was so friggin’ sick of feeling helpless. Bowing his head, he switched from the Eagles on his guitar to Eric Clapton, gently plucking out Tears in Heaven, a song he only played when he was mega depressed. A sudden rush of tears startled him, and he stopped playing to press his eyelids. “C’mon, sister mine,” he whispered, “where are you?” God, this sucked. He had to do something, man.
He glanced at his closet door. What was hidden inside there could…
No, don’t even go there, Alex. Using the “piggy-backer” was a bad idea.
The program, called a piggy-backer for its ability to ride any signal undetected, was too unpredictable. On a good day, it was a brilliant device, allowing him to hack into a system he had no business messing with. Fabulous on the surface, yes, except that when he’d invented the software back in his Berkeley days, he hadn’t had the time or the talent to rid the thing of all its bugs. So on a bad day, his piggy-backer had a nasty habit of spazzing out and obliterating everything within the very system it’d breached. A real downer. In fact, it was such a serious negative that if he used the program to hunt down Fake Toni, he could just as easily end up slamming shut the only open door he had into information about her. He’d spent this entire last week avoiding the damned thing, even though time was rapidly ticking by while his sister remained missing. Possibly in serious danger. Or dead.
“Ah, hell,” he breathed, anguish burning into his temples like a soldering iron. Screw it. Surging to his feet, he carefully set the Sorbera on its guitar stand, then crossed to his office closet. Hunkering down on his hands and knees, he rummaged through the junk inside, cursing and grunting. The small chest was way in the back, purposely buried under a crapload of stuff to keep it away from easy reach. With a final huff, he pulled the chest out, flipped open the lid, and… just about fell back on his ass.
Holy Christ, The Book.
He’d all but forgotten about the thing. He hadn’t opened it in years because … well, whenever he did, it was kind of a bizarre-o trip-out for him; for several nights afterward, his dreams would be filled with str
ange, fantastical pictures.
It was an amazing book, though. The cover itself was striking, sandy-colored and grainy in texture, the center decorated with a dark blue crescent moon and star that shimmered almost supernaturally. On the pages inside were wondrous and detailed drawings of dragons, fairies, kings and queens, labyrinths, and … a people so magnificently stunning, he couldn’t quite figure out who they were. Or what they were. Because he had a strange sense beauty like that didn’t come without a mystical element attached to it.
He’d originally thought The Book was a fairy tale written in some extinct language. The lettering looked like a mixture of ancient hieroglyphs, Runic markings, and, hell, something J.R.R. Tolkien might’ve invented. But when he’d taken it to the language department at UCSD for analysis, the linguist had told him it was utter gibberish, nothing at all readable. Although the thing was … he could read it. Sometimes, at least. Or more like, “see” pictures in the lettering, although he didn’t know how. And, well … it was no fairy tale, he’d figured out that much. More like a history of sorts, a prophesy, maybe, somehow a commentary on his own life, which was the really freaky part.
Temptation pulled at him to open The Book, but he forced himself to set it aside. He didn’t need that kind of distraction right now. He rooted deeper in the chest and found the piggy-backer. Sitting back on his heels, he stared at the disc. Maybe he should try fixing it first …. But beta testing generally took a long time, and time was exactly what he didn’t have right now. No, that precious commodity was rapidly ticking away.
He crossed to his desk and sat down, pulling the piggy-backer out of its sleeve. He filled his lungs with a long, deep breath, then slid the disc into his computer tower.
Time to set a trap.
Chapter Fourteen
Beth Costache hauled open the gymnasium door and planted herself inside, her face schooled as best she could into an expression of displeasure. The grunts of men exerting themselves flowed over her at about the same moment as the humidity of six sweaty bodies training.
Gábor was working out at the punching bag, the bull skull tattoo on his arm flexing with each hit; Nyko was at the weight rack, bench pressing what looked to be the poundage of a Hyundai; Thomal and Sedge were sparring in the boxing ring; and her husband was wrestling with Dev across the room, the two going at it relatively easily since Arc had just woken from his hibernation state today.
Gábor noticed her first. “Yo, Arc,” he called out, backing off from the bag. “Looks like trouble in paradise, Bro.”
Arc peered up from his pretzeled position on the mats. “Beth!” He untangled himself from Dev and jumped to his feet, snatching up a small towel as he crossed to her. “Hey, honey, what’s up?”
“I tried to arrange a lunch date with Toni for tomorrow, but couldn’t.” She scowled at her husband, but his lack of reaction made her feel, as usual, like some low rent actress hired for her looks and not her ability to pull off anger with any believability. “Apparently, I have to get my husband’s approval before I’m allowed to be alone with her.”
“Aw, no worries, baby.” He scrubbed the towel over his sweaty blond hair. “You can go. I’ll let Roth know everything’s cool.”
She grrred beneath her breath. “Oh, well, thank you so much for your permission.”
Arc flipped the towel over his shoulder. “Don’t get all bunched up, Beth. It’s just that Roth knows there’s some discontent among the wives right now, so he wants all requests to see Toni to go through the husbands.”
“Don’t get bunched up?!” she repeated hotly. “You’re controlling my actions, Arc.” She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “Frankly, I don’t appreciate it.”
His mouth turned down slightly as he skimmed his eyes over her. “What’s up with you?”
Oh, yes, God forbid I should ever complain about an unfairness…or anything else! “You wouldn’t have to ask me that if you ever bothered to listen to me.”
“What are you talking about?”
She couldn’t believe this! “The other night I tried to tell you how unhappy the Dragons are about the kidnappings. It’s more than just discontent, Arc, but you didn’t pay any attention. You just started kissing me, and … and …. Honest to Pete …sex, sex, sex! That’s all you ever think about or want to do.”
Arc opened his mouth … then just left it hanging open.
“Dude, Arc,” Thomal snickered from a few feet away, “you dawg.”
Arc blushed a mottled shade of red. “Shut the fuck up, would you, Thomal. Maybe nearly thirty years of not getting laid after reaching physical maturity took a big toll, all right.” He swept a glower across the other warriors.
“Hey, man,” Dev threw up his hands, “no need to explain it to me.”
Arc turned back to her. “Can we talk about this later, please?”
“You mean alone in our bedroom?” She made a hah noise. “I’m not falling for that again.”
Arc passed a hand over his face. “Beth, I’m sorry, okay. You’re … God, an incredibly beautiful woman, and I … just can’t help myself sometimes.”
“I’m glad you’re attracted to me, Arc, of course. But you’re my husband, and I’m supposed to be able to talk to you about anything.” A tight feeling caught in her throat.
“You can, baby.”
She was tempted to leave it at that. He looked and sounded so genuine, and it’d be the easiest thing in the world to allow her husband to tell her “everything’s fine,” then just go home and pretend it was. To let the other Dragon women burn their bras and instigate change so that she wouldn’t have to spend a single moment feeling uncomfortable. God, she was pitiful; she wasn’t even sure she knew how to confront her own feelings anymore. Had she really wanted to get pregnant? She loved the child growing inside her, of course, now that the baby was there, but she hadn’t thought the matter through much more than to acknowledge that being pregnant would please Arc and the community at large. And being the girl who pleased people was the skin she felt safest in. Trouble was, she was also getting fed up with how pathetic that made her feel.
The tightness slid into her chest. Her next breath strained out of her. “For five years we’ve been married and I’ve hardly ever argued with you. I hate to fight, so I … I’ve never told you certain things, like how much it hurts me that you don’t share the details of your work with me or that we don’t talk about anything deep, about books or the news or culture. It makes me feel like you think I’m weak or stupid.”
“C’mon, honey. I don’t think that.”
“Really? Did you ever talk to Roth like you said you would?” She saw his expression. “No. Of course you didn’t. Because you didn’t think I’d call you on it; you didn’t take me seriously! Heck, you probably didn’t even mean it. You just said it because you wanted to put your thingy in me.”
There was a muffled snort from one of the warriors.
“Jesus, Beth.” Arc’s face went up in smoke. “What the hell do you want me to say to Roth, anyway? Excuse me, sir, but the Dragons don’t agree with the method you’re using to try to save our entire race from extinction.”
“It’d be a start.”
Arc looked toward the ceiling for help. “Would you please be reasonable.”
“As soon as you stop being unreasonable and start speaking out against something you recognize is wrong.”
“You know,” Sedge butted in, “Kimberly says the same thing to me, Beth, and it’s frustrating, because this isn’t our decision to make. We’re not the men in charge.”
“Exactly,” Arc agreed enthusiastically, obviously glad for the support. “What you’re asking me to do would be like me asking you to tell the President of the United States that he needs to fucking shape up.”
Her stomach fluttered nervously. Facing down more than her husband hadn’t been in the plan. And it wasn’t just Sedge on Arc’s side; all of the warriors were. She could see it on their faces. “Y-yes, well, at least in America we have
a say, a vote, about matters that affect our lives, and … and we have certain freedoms. The President of the United States sure as heck doesn’t get to tell me who I can or can’t have lunch with. Or when I can or can’t use the Internet. Here in Ţărână, Roth has way too much power, and the Dragons are sick of it. We need a voice, and if you can’t stand up to the leadership for us, if … if ….” She made herself push the words out, “if you’re too damned weak to do that, then we will.”
Arc’s cheeks flushed a dull, furious red.
One of the warriors made a low sound in his throat that resounded into a weighted silence.
Her eyelashes started to quiver uncontrollably, and she fought to keep her stomach where it belonged.
“You know what –” Arc yanked open the gym, door. “Go ahead, then.” He invited her to leave with a sweep of his hand. “Do your worst, Beth.”
Her lips parted. She gaped at him for several erratic pulse beats, unable to believe he was being so cavalier about her – or any of the Dragon’s – ability to wreak havoc on Roth or the community. It was insulting beyond measure, and it put steel in places she’d never had it before, like her spine.
Snapping her mouth shut, she moved stiffly into the doorjamb. “In five years of marriage, I think I’m seeing you clearly for the first time, Arc.” Tears surged into her eyes, but she fought them back.
A muscle quivered in Arc’s jaw.
“You Vârcolac males like to make us Dragons think we’re so special to you, but the truth is,” she lowered her voice to a hiss, “we’re not even worth the effort for you to fight for us.”
The Community Series, Books 1-3 Page 11