Jonah Read online

  Cameron scratched the back of his head. “Phelan ain’t gonna like that much. I’ll have to ask her to meet me later.”

  “Wait—” Balancing the tray one-handed, I grabbed the back of his arm.

  “Yes, Lailah?”

  “What you said before … It’s important that you know that there is absolutely nothing only about being human.”

  Cameron took heed and then left in Molly’s direction. Just then, the pub doors swung open. The chatter of conversation hushed as a group of men walked in. Dressed smartly, these gentlemen were clearly not members of the Sealgaire. The tall, dark-haired man at the front removed his scarf from around his neck before pushing through the thick layer of smoke that filled the air. As he stepped forward, the chap behind him came into view.

  I did a double take.

  Here we were, yet again, in the same place at the same time. The theoretical physicist, self-confessed geek, and son of Sir Montmorency, Gabriel’s business associate. Darwin. What were the chances?

  Darwin waded through Phelan’s soldiers, pushing his way to the bar. He scraped back his blond hair and pressed his finger down on the bridge of his glasses before gesturing to the bartender.

  Concentrating so intently on Darwin, I jumped when Gabriel’s hand found my shoulder. “Lailah?” he said, his voice sounding an octave higher than usual, acting as the question mark to the end of my name. Never one to forget his manners, Gabriel took the tray from me. “Ah, Darwin,” he said.

  “Yes, Darwin. What’s he doing here?”

  “The same as the group he travels with—working.”

  My mind tumbled. From the conversation I had shared with Darwin at his home in Chelsea, I knew his work had crossed into the realms of the supernatural. With the fixed gateways to the first and third dimensions in Lucan, it seemed unlikely that his presence here was coincidence.

  Gabriel changed the subject. “I need to speak with you.”

  Still thinking about Darwin, I replied absently, “I’m sorry, you’ve been waiting a long time.”

  “Three years is nothing. I would wait an eternity, and you know that.”

  Sadly, I did. And it was the primary reason I wasn’t pushing our pending conversation to the top of the pile.

  Darwin was shuffling on the stool at the bar, and as he paid for his drinks, he looked past the barman at me. He scratched his head, but as a smile spread across his face, I knew he had placed me. I would find out what Darwin was doing here myself.

  Three years Gabriel had waited for me, and his wait wasn’t over.

  I excused myself in a hurry. “I’m sorry, would you mind taking the drinks? I’ll just be a minute, please.”

  I couldn’t be sure how much of my enthusiasm at seeing Darwin had to do with further procrastinating my heart-to-heart with Gabriel and how much was caused by getting a glimpse of a friendly face, one that I had known, albeit briefly, at a simpler time in my life.

  Either way, I left Gabriel and eased my way through the crowd.

  By the time I reached Darwin, the pub was eerily quiet, so I whispered Darwin’s name when I greeted him.

  “Cessie,” he said, using the name he knew me by. He slid his fingers through mine, regarding me in that familiar way of his. As he squeezed my hands in his, the wooden bar top and the faded paintings hanging over his shoulder on the far back wall all warped. My vision became tunneled. The world around me wobbled.

  Like a drawing, ink spread out before me, creating shapes. Two hands, reaching forward …

  I was experiencing a vision.

  Lines continued to form, creating two upside-down triangles that flashed bright green.

  I was falling.…

  As Darwin released me, I was brought back abruptly, and I steadied myself.

  Experiencing visions was hardly new. Before I had realized what I was, memories of my past would come to me, activated by my senses—sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch, any of which could take me back to a previous life. But this vision wasn’t of what had gone before; it was of what was to come.

  It must have all happened so quickly that Darwin didn’t notice that anything had transpired. He stepped back to get a better look at me. “I think I might start calling you Psylocke.”

  I gathered myself quickly. “I’m sorry?”

  “She belongs to the Marvel Universe.” He emphasized his next words. “She’s a superhero.”

  “I’m not sure what would qualify me as a superhero.”

  “Well, firstly, you do rather look the part. I told you once before that your blue and black contacts were a little too X-Men even for my taste, but then, I hadn’t seen them paired with this rather fantastic mask.” He fiddled with the wing of one of the blue butterflies next to my ear. “Of course, that’s just surface stuff. Scratch to reveal what’s underneath, remember?” He was referring to the conversation we’d shared the night we met, when Darwin sought to uncover my true identity.

  Under close surveillance from Phelan’s private table, I fidgeted as I offered Darwin a small nod. “Forgive me for saying, but you seem a little out of place here. What brings you to Lucan?” I asked, changing the subject. Darwin gestured for me to take the stool beside him but I shook my head. “No, thank you. I won’t keep you from your friends.” I tipped my chin toward the four men he’d come with, who were unsuccessfully trying to find room at the bar.

  Darwin snorted. “You’d think after five years coming back and forth, this place would be a home away from home. You might even expect the locals would be used to me by now, wouldn’t you?”

  “Five years, that long?”

  “I was on my way here when I made your acquaintance, in fact.”

  The night we met, Darwin’s car had broken down outside the pub I was working in. He’d been on his way to Holyhead to catch the ferry across the Irish Sea, saying he was on business. I knew from our second meeting at his father’s home in Chelsea that his “business” involved assisting with the study of the singlet particle, a particle that was able to exist and travel through time and space. The crystal from Styclar-Plena contained that very matter. Darwin and the scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, had discovered it within a crystal taken from the neck of a fallen Angel, which had one way or another ended up in the hands of Darwin’s father, Sir Montmorency. Thankfully, the crystals taken from the necks of Angels who requested to fall were virtually void of any light, but there had been residue traces, enough for the physicists to discover the singlet particle when they’d placed the crystals in the Hadron Collider contained within a tunnel deep underground in Switzerland. But how any of that had managed to connect Darwin to Lucan, I didn’t know. If I wanted an answer, I was going to have to ask bluntly.

  “What business could you possibly have here? It’s hardly a place for science.”

  Darwin regarded me again, deliberating perhaps how much information to give away. “I’ve always believed that the answers to mankind’s most profound questions aren’t out there. I always thought they could be found right here. The universe is an ever-expanding entity as it moves forward and spreads out.” He demonstrated with his hands. “Many fields of study explore that expansion, but I prefer to delve into the layers that make up our universe, or as we call it in the business, M-theory.”

  Gathering his change from the bartender, he placed a number of coins corner to corner, creating a small circle. “Other dimensions, Cessie.” Picking up the euros one by one, he created a stack. “Lucan is, shall we say, a very interesting place, one that keeps calling me back.” Cupping his palm behind his coin tower, he slid it off the bar and then discarded them into a tip jar.

  The gateways to the first and the third dimensions … were they bringing Darwin here? Did he know they existed? If he knew and if he had been coming here for five years, clearly either he’d never managed to locate them or someone was preventing him from doing so.

  “I’m surprised you’ve left Chelsea, what with everything tha
t’s going on in the world.” I was fishing, throwing out my line to see if I might catch something unexpected. Still, the fresh knowledge of what was happening to humans made my stomach roil.

  Darwin raised an eyebrow. “You know, when we met, you reminded me of the person I lost, the person I wished more than anything I had been able to save, and so I wanted to help you.” He thought carefully. “So I’m going to tell you something very few people know, in the hope that you’ll let me do for you what I couldn’t do for her.” He looked me straight in the eye. “The government is lying when they say that the Spinodes are people affected by the fallout from the chemical explosions. Of course, they are affected by something, but it has nothing to do with the poison gas. The world’s leaders know the truth, and they’ve known it for a very long while now.”

  I waited with the appropriate amount of bated breath one might expect from someone not in the know.

  Darwin nodded, continuing, “They don’t come from the farthest corners of space. They exist in dimensions that are stacked above and below our own, places where time doesn’t touch them. Interdimensional aliens, Cessie, and I am not talking ‘little green men.’” He was right, of course—not that he knew that I knew it. “I couldn’t save her, but maybe I can save you.” Searching, he dug deep into his blazer pockets, revealing his T-shirt, which had the number 42 printed on the chest. To anyone else it might not mean a thing, but Darwin had informed me that this number was of paramount importance. That it was “the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.” Well, at least according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  Finally, he produced a business card. Embossed in fancy lettering was “Dr. Darwin B. B. Montmorency, PhD, SM,” followed by his job title, “Senior Theoretical Physicist,” and his place of work, “CERN.” In a plain font, Darwin’s cell number and e-mail address were printed at the bottom.

  “PhD … SM … That’s a whole lot of letters,” I mused.

  “You can be impressed when I’ve added ‘ScD’—my doctorate in science. Hopefully my contribution to CERN will soon take care of that.”

  He slid a Mont Blanc fountain pen out of his back trouser pocket and pulled the top off with his teeth. He scribbled something on the back of the card before handing it to me. “In case you don’t remember, this is my address in Chelsea. I’m leaving in an hour, and I don’t suppose I’ll be able to convince you to come with me this evening.” He didn’t wait for a reply, assuming my answer would be the same as the night he had met me. “Please think on what I have told you and follow me to London.”

  He squeezed his hands over the top of mine, causing the business card to crumple within my palm. That same feeling I’d experienced during the visions on the hilltop ran beneath my skin, turning my blood cold as he offered his final words of warning.

  “Please believe me when I tell you that I have seen and I have known a great deal of unfathomable things in my short years, and listen to me when I say that there are some threats even the greatest of superheroes cannot overcome.” He eyed me carefully and tipped his chin as he once again focused on my butterflies. “Whatever this is all about, you should rethink it. Go back to being Betsy Braddock and leave this place, because if you stay here…” He released my hands and voiced the very words I knew in my soul to be true. “You will die here.”

  NINE

  AFTER DARWIN’S HAUNTING ADMONITION, he left swiftly. A few hours later, my group was on its way back to the main house. With Phelan beside me, Jonah, Gabriel, and Ruadhan trailed behind. I could sense unrest within Jonah, but I didn’t know why. More than once I glanced over my shoulder to see if he was okay, and it was only when he winked at me the third time that I was reassured.

  More than twenty members of the Sealgaire accompanied us. Apparently the Savior required close guard day and night. I’d insisted the men concentrate their efforts on protecting one another and the townspeople, not waste their energy on me. I could more than take care of myself. But Phelan had overruled me, and though he’d said it was for my safety, I mostly thought it was so he could keep a close eye on my movements while plans were hatched to win this war. Despite several hours of discussion, ideas on how to do this were sparse. With hundreds of thousands of Second Generation Vampires now roaming the Earth, how a single individual would be able to effect any kind of meaningful change was a question no one had a definitive answer for.

  Not far from the main house, or Sealgaire HQ, as Phelan preferred his home to be known, a teary-eyed Molly suddenly appeared on the pavement. Calling after her as she hurried toward us, Cameron wasn’t far behind, but it was Phelan raising his hand in the air that made Molly halt. Before he had a chance to address her or Cameron, I shouted, “Wait!”

  Ruadhan picked up on the slightest shiver within the tree’s branches overhead only a second after I did. And as I twisted around, he’d already stretched his arms out protectively in front of Gabriel and Iona. Then, bending his knees, he jumped and curled into a forward somersault, propelling the Vampire away. To the human eye, a mere shape blurred as Ruadhan’s feet thrust out into the air, but I had seen and cataloged every feature, from the Vampire’s emerald-green eyes before they began to burn to the scar running down his cheek and over his lip.

  The three soldiers marching ahead of us spun around and raised their shotguns, searching for something to shoot at. Electric light sizzled at my fingertips, but a sharp sting scraped in my throat, distracting me. I whirled around, and in the second it took me to check that Jonah was still with us, the three men were taken, pulled up by their shotguns and stolen into the night. Carried on the breeze, their cries lasted longer than they did.

  The remaining men clicked their shotguns’ safeties off in unison and took up a defensive stance, spreading out to provide us with coverage.

  Jonah wasn’t where I’d last seen him, and as I sought him out in the inner circle, I ran through my register: Gabriel, Ruadhan, Iona, Riley, Jack, and Phelan, all present, but no sign of my Vampire.

  I growled.

  Vampires, plural, now moved above us like shadows, disguised against the darkness. Branches bowed and snapped as the demons leaped from one tree to the next. Low, pained moans accompanied their dance. As I ran my eyes once more around the circle, looking for Jonah, stringy, sticky drool pooled on one of the soldier’s shoulders. I shouted, “Get down!”

  The fair-haired boy ducked immediately, narrowly avoiding the Vampire’s bloodstained hungry hands, which swiped erratically into empty air. My streak of light reached the Vampire’s chest midflight and he lit up like a firework, exploding in a ball of flame. The toasted embers of his remains scattered as they turned to ash, and it was as if he had never existed at all.

  Though they hesitated, taken aback by my work, the Sealgaire took aim at the starving savages atop the trees. My light was just enough for them to aim and fire their weapons.

  The Vampires overhead were not strong and stealthy. They were sickly and sluggish, their skin rotting from their bones. Starving and malnourished, it seemed to me that the ones who were stopping to attack were acting out of desperation.

  I listened for the trump pump of Jonah’s heartbeat, trying to distinguish it from those of the demons, now fleeing in a frenzy, but he wasn’t among them.

  There was a shrill hiss as a Vampire darted from above us, careening in my direction. Phelan knocked me away, pulling a silver dagger from his back pocket, and he rammed it into the demon’s chest. The impaled Vampire gurgled and a thick tar bubbled from the corner of her discolored lips. Phelan forced her chin back with the ball of his hand, retracting his blade in one clean and concise move. The Vampire’s form burst, soaking the pavement and turning into nothing more than a gooey puddle.

  Behind me, Gabriel broke away from Ruadhan, leaving Iona in his care as he rushed to my side. Iona’s expression should have been filled with panic, but as she watched Gabriel leave, her plump lower lip hung open. She was upset that he would abandon her so easily for
me.

  “What are you doing?” I snapped.

  “Protecting you.” His reply was swift as he yanked me toward him, attempting to shield me with his body.

  Drawing my face into his chest, he clipped my butterfly’s wings, and as I pushed him back, the butterfly stretched and took flight. “No, Gabriel,” I said.

  Undeterred, he reached for my waist, fighting for me.

  It was a fight he would lose.

  “I don’t need you, she does—” I was stopped short, interrupted by Molly’s hysterical scream that cut through the cold as a wounded Vampire dragged her along the roadside by the hem of her skirt.

  I didn’t need the protection of this circle of soldiers, but Molly did.

  Neither did I need the protection Gabriel was trying to afford me, but Iona did.

  Molly, Iona, and the members of the Sealgaire, all considered collateral damage to Gabriel.

  My hands grew warm as I willed my light, but being surrounded by the Sealgaire and their silver weapons made this a struggle. The quickest way out was up. I crouched and launched high into the air, meeting two Vampires and taking them both with me as I hurled back down to the roadside outside of the protective circle. I held each one by the scruff of its neck. Their skin fried under the fire burning in my palms. A blinding glow projected like the sun’s rays out from in between the gaps of my fingers. The Vampires’ limp bodies dropped, followed by their heads, which had been torn straight off from the force of my light.

  Stepping up beside me, Cameron shakily pointed a crossbow at the Vampire dragging Molly. The silver arrow whipped through the air, narrowly missing its target, hitting the demon in the arm instead of the chest. Still, the Vampire dropped to the ground, wailing as the silver sparked against his skin.

  Cameron drew a nervous breath. His big, soft eyes sought my approval, and then I understood why. “Show her, right?” His voice wobbled.

  Running over to Molly, he pulled her up from the ground, but it wasn’t Cameron’s arms from which she sought solace. She fled to one of the soldiers behind me, calling “William!” as she grabbed and then clung to him.