by Janet Tait
When they returned, his aunt addressed Kate. “You are free to go, provided you agree to the following: No charges will be filed against Melina, should she recover, or any member of the Makris family for the use of primal magic or assassination. No vendettas will be pursued. All discussion of primal magic will be kept private, between our families only. This agreement will be sealed between you, as the presumptive Hamilton heir, and the Makris heir, Kristof.”
Kate looked up at him, her eyes reflecting the loss in his. “The Makris heir?”
“Yes,” he said.
She let out a breath, and with it, he felt their hopes and dreams evaporate.
His aunt continued. “And you will return the Makris arsenal to us in exchange for your freedom, as your father and Nico Makris agreed before the unfortunate…incident. Now. Before you leave.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Victor said. “There’s no way—”
“Whatever,” Kate said. “We don’t need those toys, Victor. I just want to take Dad home.”
Kristof called over a guard. “Get the Hamilton strike force from lockup. And bring me Kate’s possessions. Now.”
They walked down the thin strip of beach together one last time.
“I guess you had to make that deal,” Kate said. She slipped her hand in his.
“Seemed like the only way to keep you safe.”
“I don’t need your protection.”
“You do here. Unless you want to kill a lot more of my relatives.”
She turned to him. “Kristof, I’m sorry. About your father.”
“Don’t be. Things can change here without him in charge. I can be a different kind of leader.”
“Can you?”
“Yes.” He looked down the beach at Dmitri gesturing wildly to his uncle Yannis, at Melina unconscious on the sand. At his aunt Elena taking his uncle Stavros aside. Somehow, he’d figure it out. “Take your people and go home.”
He leaned down and brushed her forehead with his lips. She squeezed his hand, one tight pulse, then let go. He watched her walk back to the cove where his people had brought the rest of the Hamilton operatives to join Victor, Pearce, and Brooke. Grayson Hamilton appeared on the dock in a flash of green light, wooden crates piled at his feet, waiting for the Makrises to pass him through the security grid.
Kristof slid his hand into his pocket and drew out Kate’s pearl buttons. He ran his thumb gently across their smooth surfaces. Then he let them fall, one by one, to the beach and strode through the shifting sands to join his family.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Get used to being the heir,” Grayson said as he leaned against the doorway, his thick hair combed back. “Start playing with the tools of power. After the confirmation comes through from the Council, you’ll have to sit in on meetings.”
Kate sat back in the leather chair behind her father’s large walnut desk in his—no, Grayson’s—office. She should get up. Sit in the other chair, on the other side of the desk. The Council of Affiliates had confirmed her as a caster yesterday, after Grayson had shown them her test results and told them what happened in Greece. Well, most of it. Confirmation as the Hamilton heir would take longer. Politics, Grayson said. He had been confirmed as Regent, of course—she was way, way too inexperienced to run anything, much less a family, for years.
“Meetings—on top of training, classes, and what else?” she asked.
“We have a lot of work to do, training you, honing your new powers. Despite everything…everything that happened, the one good thing that came out of this was you. You’re a primal magic caster, Kate. Do you know what that means?” His eyes lit up with a fervor she’d never seen in him. Not when riding a horse to a steeplechase victory or when teaching a student his first spell. “I’m proud of you, sweetheart.” He stepped outside and closed the door.
He was proud. Okay, maybe she had single-handedly decimated the Makris family, become the modern world’s first, and maybe only—no news on whether Melina would ever wake up—primal magic caster, and helped broker a deal that got her and their people away from the Makrises. But the cost? She ran her hand over her father’s cigar box.
The cost was steep.
She picked up the scholarship letter sitting on the desk. Another price to pay. She stared at the words, the sentences, the ultimate confirmation that she could make a career of what she loved. Acting.
Maybe once. Before Brian and the Sanctum. Before Melina. Before Kristof. Now… She crumbled the paper and tossed it into the fireplace, locking that pain in her heart away for good.
She’d be transferring to Harvard—Brian’s school, her father’s school—splitting her time between the estate’s caster academy and Cambridge. Like Victor had said, she needed to learn how to make the powerful people dance to her tune. Oh joy.
No room for theatre in her life any longer. No role for Cornell…or anything else from her past.
The next time she’d see Kristof they would most likely be trading kinetic punches. Like every Hamilton and Makris had for the last few hundred years. She drew in a deep breath, but the ache in her chest didn’t lessen.
The door opened, and Victor stepped inside.
She shot to her feet. “I—”
“Sit down. It’ll be your chair soon enough.” Victor grabbed a beer from the fridge under the liquor cabinet—Dad’s favorite, a local microbrew. Asshole. That was her father’s beer—he shouldn’t make so free with it, he shouldn’t… Tears trickled down her cheek. She wiped them away with the back of her hand.
He pretended not to notice as he took a seat across from her and focused, his eyes going hard then distant as he engaged the room’s security spells. “You know, we’ve never really gotten along. You’re spoiled—”
Her head jerked up. “I’m not spoiled.”
“Willful, headstrong, rebellious, and won’t do a damn thing you’re told.”
“And you’re not my father. You’re not even my brother.” Her voice caught. “You’ve no right to talk to me like you are.”
“Maybe not. But you’re Cooper Hamilton’s daughter, and he’s the man who took me in and gave me a chance when everyone else wanted to kill me on sight. I will never stop owing him.” He paused and rubbed at something in his eye, then twisted the cap off the beer bottle and took a drink. “That means I owe you. There’s only one problem.”
You’re an arrogant jerk with delusions of grandeur?
“You don’t trust me,” Victor said. “Why didn’t you tell me about this power of yours? I can’t protect you if I don’t know the threat.” He leaned back in his chair, hand around the beer bottle.
“Victor…” Why hadn’t she told him? If she had, if she’d trusted him with the knowledge of how her magic was different, they could have…done what? Well, she wouldn’t have gone around him to see Kristof, wouldn’t have gotten kidnapped, and Dad would still be alive, sitting in this chair, instead of her.
The hard line of his mouth softened as he gazed at her. Behind him, her mother’s portrait hung above the fireplace, reflecting the light from the big picture windows.
She sat back down. “Why did you take me to San Francisco, the night my mom died? Keep me there, not let me call, talk to her, anything?”
He sighed. “All this is about your mother.”
“It’s about you. You asked me why I don’t trust you. So answer the question.”
“Kate, she was trying to kill you. The mirror smashing, the paranoid break—it all came together when you came back from school that day. We took a knife away from her right before you hugged her at the front door. She’d figured out a way to get free of the spellcuffs. She was convinced that if she could sacrifice you to the ancient casters, they would leave her alone.”
No. That can’t be true.
She tried to remember that day, two years ago, when her mother had her last, and worst, paranoid break. The way her mother had run toward her, the hard gleam in her eyes, how she’d clutched at Kate and screamed. And th
e knife. The knife that had flashed once in her hand before Victor twisted it away.
Victor is telling me the truth. She wasn’t trying to escape. She was after me.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Every time I yelled at you about keeping me away from her, every time I… Why did you keep it a secret?”
“Because that’s what your dad wanted, princess.”
Well, shit. She buried her head in her hands.
“Can we start fresh?” She raised her head. “Pretend we’re meeting for the first time today and start trusting each other?”
“Let’s begin with this.” He tossed Brian’s journal on the desk, along with her grandfather’s watch.
She sighed and told him about finding the journal and the watch in the catalpa grove. About using primal magic for the first time, no idea what she was doing, to extract the journal and watch from their hiding place. Combing through the journal, trying to figure out why Brian would hide a book filled with pointless facts behind a magical ward spell.
“He wouldn’t hide something irrelevant.” Victor picked up the journal and flipped through it. His eyes had gone soft, unfocused, as if he was using his magesight. “The book’s spell-coded.”
“What?”
“Someone encrypted it using a cipher spell. The spell makes the writing look like a bunch of meaningless crap, unless you have the original cipher spell. Or the key.”
“Key? What would…” Her gaze fell on the watch. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? She picked it up. “Is this it? I found it in the cache along with the journal.”
“Stupid to hide both in the same place. Maybe he was in a hurry.”
“Or he knew I was the only person who’d find anything in the catalpa grove, and he wanted me to find the journal and the key to decode it.”
Victor raised an eyebrow. “You like your answers all wrapped up in little packages, don’t you, princess?” He took the watch from her. “Let’s see what happens when we put it alongside…” As he placed the watch directly on top of the first page of the journal it lit up with a bright-green glow. “Whoa. I’d say we found the key. Want to see what Brian wrote?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think you’re going to find in there?” he asked.
“The name of the person who sent Brian after the stone.”
“Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
She’d suspected some things when Dylan had told her his theories, when Melina had confirmed them, when she’d finally understood how to deal with primal magic. An understanding she gained from the book on Brian’s bedside table. A book only one person would have given him.
“I think so,” she said. “But the journal should confirm it.”
He set the watch on the desk. “So let’s decode it. You need to put up a shield. I wouldn’t put it past Brian to booby-trap his precious tell-all.”
She touched her father’s cufflinks, still in her pocket, and sent the quick command for shield. A strong blue glow sprang up around her. Victor raised his own shield.
She watched as Victor sent a tiny purple tendril of energy into the journal. It scanned the pages of the book, first slowly, then faster until it spun on the desk like a firecracker about to burst. The watch glowed green and began to shake, moving closer and closer to the book. When they met, the glow flared in brilliance, then went dark.
“No bang,” Kate said.
“Nope. Maybe Brian really did want you to find it.”
Kate turned off the shield, picked up the journal, and opened to the first page. The gibberish about the tests Brian had aced and the girls he’d dated was gone. In its place was an account of the meeting where Grayson had sat Brian down and set about convincing him that becoming the world’s first primal magic caster would be a great and wonderful thing.
Kate read, and read more, then handed the journal to Victor. As he paged through the book in the dying light of the summer sun, she took the cufflinks out and spun one on the table.
Then she leaned back and planned her first move.
Acknowledgements
I labored over this novel for a very long time, and many people have extended to me their time, expertise, support, and guidance. If you enjoyed this book, it is in a large part thanks to them. Any mistakes made are mine alone.
Many people deserve my thanks and acknowledgment, and given that I am quite scatterbrained at times, I am sure I will inadvertently leave someone off my list who was tremendously important to this book. If so, I humbly apologize and thank you for your assistance.
My editors—Mark Clements and Danielle Poiesz—gave me oodles and oodles of help making sure that my plot made sense, my characters were compelling, my facts were straight, and my grammar and spelling were top-notch.
I received invaluable help and support from my fellow writers while working on this book. Some critiqued individual chapters, some read the entire book and let me know what they thought, some gave me helpful advice on the industry, some offered a shoulder to cry on and a friend with whom to celebrate. I want to especially acknowledge the Gorilla Writers (Scott Barbour, Suad Campbell, Charlie Daly, Aron Diaz, Melanie Hooks, Rick Landin, Doug Lathrop, John Mullen, Cris Powell, Ely Rareshide, Kathy Paulek, and Indy Quillen), the Freedom Writers (Aron, Melanie, Doug, Cris, Ely, and Laura Perkins), and the Flying Pink Elephant Society (Marie Andreas, Shoshana Brown, Cassi Carver, Melissa Cutler, Rachael Davila, Lisa Kessler, Georgie Lee, and Tami Vahalik). I also want to give a shout-out to friends and family—John Rogers, Barbara Vivian Rogers, Sharon Arkin, Margaret Bloodgood, Stuart Dervish, Cat Gengler, Sue Glueck, Bree Kauzlaurich, and Cindy Leech—who read my book and gave me an unfiltered reader reaction.
I am fortunate to belong to several communities of writers. Each one was unstinting with their help and advice. My colleagues at the San Diego Chapter of the Romance Writers of America provide a supportive environment for learning, networking, connecting with publishing professionals, and sharing my triumphs and disappointments. The staff and attendees of the Southern California Writers Conference gave me editorial help, critiques, valuable information on the business, and endless camaraderie. My friends from Martha Beck’s Writers’ Retreat and San Diego Writers Ink have encouraged and supported me.
My writing teachers—Nancy Holder, Orson Scott Card, Stephen Potts, Mark Clements, and Judy Reeves—were instrumental in teaching me the nuts and bolts of the craft of writing. My work would be infinitely poorer without their lessons and advice.
Kim and Chris from A Butler’s Manor B&B in Southampton, NY graciously provided both hospitality and useful local info on my research trip to the Hamptons.
Finally, my family has supported me and sustained me when stinging rejections and creative frustrations made me want to pound my head against the wall until the gremlins of disappointment and despair flew out my ears. This book would not have been written, much less published, without the unfailing support of my husband, John Rogers. He guided me, comforted me, consoled me, and encouraged me every time I needed his love and friendship. I love you more than I could express in an acknowledgments section, or for that matter, if I had all the words and all the pages in the world.
About the Author
Janet Tait has loved writing for as long as she can remember but tried IT administration, website development, market research, and product management before surrendering to her inevitable destiny. She lives in San Diego, California with her husband and, in her spare time, enjoys haunting the halls of comic and science fiction conventions, playing old-timey tabletop role-playing games with her friends, and binge-watching British TV shows on Netflix. You can reach her at www.janettait.com or via email at [email protected].
Dear Reader:
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In gratitude, Janet Tait