Silence was my only answer.
Kristoff? Everything OK?
I stood up as the profound silence filled my head. “Something’s wrong,” I said, trying to open up my senses to locate Kristoff.
She paused at the door. “What?”
“Kristoff isn’t answering me.”
She glanced at the phone for a moment before her eyebrows arched. “Oh, the mind thing? Maybe he’s busy. Or out of range.”
I shook my head, suddenly filled with the strongest portent of danger. “I don’t think so. Something has happened to cause him to close his mind to mine, and that can only be one thing.”
“Reapers?” she asked, her face losing some of its animation.
I nodded. “Or worse.”
She froze for a moment. “Come to think of it, Ray should have been upstairs by now. Even if he had been drinking that lovely Costa Russi, he should have. . . . I’m going to go check on him.”
She dashed out of the room without waiting for a response.
Possessed by a sudden sense of urgency, I hurriedly wrapped up the journal, shoved the bit of trim back onto the desk, and without an alternate choice, stuffed the journal under my dress, into the band of my underwear.
I snatched up the penlight that Kristoff had left me, flipping off the room’s light before carefully closing the door. The house was dark now that the sun was setting, but the penlight allowed me to pick out the way to the stairs that led down to the main floor. It, too, was in the dark, and for a moment I hesitated, the primitive part of my mind refusing to march blindly into what felt like certain danger.
My foot had just hit the first stair when a noise behind me startled me, causing me to simultaneously gasp and spin around, one hand clutching the penlight, the other groping the journal as it pressed against my skin.
A face loomed suddenly out of the darkness. My skin crawled in horror for a moment, my body giving in to the flight instinct. I stepped backward and plummeted down the staircase into the inky blackness below.
CHAPTER 13
The pain caught my attention first. It was sharp and hot, radiating out from a spot on the side of my head, dull waves of agony that brought the rest of my awareness to me.
“Unh?” I said, my tongue seemingly made of lead as I blinked my eyes, trying to shake off the last shreds of oblivion that clung to the edges of my mind. “Hrng?”
“Are you awake? How do you feel?”
I blinked a couple more times. Light and shadows flashed on my face, blurred into fleeting shapes that seemed to rush past me.
“Boo?” I asked, trying to adjust my position, and wincing at the pain in my head that followed the movement. “Ow. What the hell?”
The man’s voice was a pleasant baritone with a slight German accent, sophisticated and sexy. “You hit your head on the banister when you fell. I caught you before you tumbled down the stairs, so you should be fine. Immortality is just one of the perks of being a Beloved.”
Carefully I turned my head to look in the direction of the voice, my eyes still not focusing too well. Slowly, a face resolved itself, dimly lit, but recognizable. “Alec?” I asked, the memory of him emerging from the darkness of his house returning with an impact that had me struggling upright.
Something bound me, holding me back. I struggled with the thing, realizing as a metallic click sounded that it was a seat belt. I was in a car.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, pushing myself up from where I’d been slumped in the passenger seat. Pain bit hard and deep in my head for a few seconds, slowly ebbing away to a dull throb. “Oh, God. I remember now. You loomed up out of the darkness and scared the crap out of me.”
“I’m sorry for that, love.” Alec caught himself, making a little face. “I suppose I shouldn’t call you that anymore. Not since . . . Well. What’s done can’t be undone.”
“If you’re talking about Kristoff . . . ,” I began slowly, rebuckling my seat belt. With extreme caution, I felt the side of my head. There was a good-sized lump there. “No, it can’t be undone. Not that I would want to even if I could change it. Ouch. I don’t suppose you have an ice pack handy?”
He shook his head, glancing briefly at me before returning his eyes to the road. “You are happy with Kristoff? I had thought that you and I had a great future before us. It seemed to me that you thought so, too.”
“I don’t think we were ever really meant to be,” I said uncomfortably, and not just due to the headache. “I will always cherish our time together, though. And I can’t believe I’m saying something so predictable and trite, but I hope that you won’t allow my relationship with Kristoff to come between our friendship, or your friendship with Kristoff. Assuming, that is, that you are not really working for the Brotherhood and about to turn me over to them so they can perform insanely evil acts against my person.”
Alec’s lips thinned. He was, as I had had occasion to note at some length, an exceedingly handsome man. He was dark haired, like Kristoff, but where Kristoff had dark auburn curls, Alec’s hair was a rich, deep, dark chocolate, straight and silky, pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes were green like a cat’s, and although our physical relationship hadn’t gone beyond one night together, he had enough raw magnetism that even in my somewhat muddled state I felt the impact of his nearness.
“That you can even think such a thing about me pains me deeply,” Alec said, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Well, you have to admit that you haven’t done much for making people think you’re a knight in shining armor. Where have you been? What have you been doing? And why have you kidnapped me?”
“I haven’t kidnapped you; I’ve saved you,” he said, shooting me an irritated glance. “There were reapers all around my house. I sneaked in through the attic and was going to retrieve a valuable when I heard people.”
I suddenly remembered the old diary Magda and I found. I slid my hand toward my stomach, relieved to feel the stiff vellum-and-goatskin journal resting against it. Alec must have seen the movement.
“Yes, my reaper journal. It would appear I need to find a new hiding place for it. Oh, don’t distress yourself, love. I didn’t take it from you. In fact, you will find it most interesting reading, although I would like it back when you are through with it. You might ask Kristoff to translate parts for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t know-”
He made an abortive gesture. “It doesn’t matter. I was about to strike you down when I saw you near the stairs, having assumed you were a reaper-or rather, one of the reapers who would not hesitate to kill me-when I realized it was you. What was Kristoff doing, leaving you alone in my home?”
“He didn’t leave me alone,” I said, sick to my stomach and confused as all get-out.
“He didn’t?”
“No. He was out in the guesthouse. At least, I thought he was, but he didn’t answer me when I tried to contact him.”
Alec swore and slammed his foot on the brake, the car fishtailing wildly to the accompaniment of horns from the cars behind us as he pulled an extremely illegal U-turn across a grass strip dividing the highway, and headed us back in the direction we’d just come.
“Where are we going now?” I asked.
“Back to get Kristoff. They must have him. The place was swarming with them when I arrived.”
Fear rolled through me, leaving my hands clammy. Kristoff? Please answer me!
Silence hung heavily in my head.
“He’s still not answering,” I said, nausea leaving me weak and shaking.
“We’ll find him,” Alec said, his jaw tight. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “We were not followed. With luck, they will still be searching my house and will not have removed him yet.”
“I’m seriously confused, here,” I said, touching the lump on the side of my head again. “Are you on our side? Or are you yanking my chain? Because, so help me God, Alec, if you’ve done something to Kristoff-”