You don’t want to start a fire you can’t put out.
The room was cold. Achingly so. I needed a fire to counter the chill that knifed straight to my core. Shouldn’t be so cold this time of year. I could go turn up the heat, I thought dimly, but when I got out of bed to do so the room was pitch dark and the floor ice cold glass.
I wandered barefoot through darkness on an endless plain of smooth glass. Cold and black. Nothing. Forever. Step after frigid step.
“Dear one.” A voice. His voice. “Do not fret. It does not become you.”
“Lord Rhyzkahl?” I whispered, felt the darkness swallow the words. “Where are you?”
“I am here. I am always here.”
I looked down as a pale amber glow pierced the darkness. A beautiful filigree design of intricate fine lines glimmered on my upper chest with soft, breathtaking radiance. My throat tightened. “My lord? I do not understand.”
“Do you not, precious one?”
The glassy plain began to tilt. A voice like the hiss of sand flowing over stones whispered in my ear.
Rowan.
I cried out in shock as I lost my footing. “My lord!” Heart pounding, I flattened myself on the glass, braced with hands and feet to keep from sliding.
“Elinor. Elinor!” A different voice. Distant and desperate.
“Giovanni!” I called into the darkness. “I am lost! Help me!”
“Count, Elinor. Uno. Due. Tre. Quattro. Count.”
Rowan.
“Uno,” I said, then shrieked as the glass tilted more. Terror gripped me as I began to slide toward oblivion.
“Elinor!” he called. “Kara!”
Giovanni’s face swam in the darkness. Square jaw set with worry. Teasing smile gone. “Kara. Count.” His image distorted. Twisted. “Kara.”
“Due. Tre,” I said through gritted teeth. The glass leveled enough to stop my descent. “I’m here. Kara. Quattro. Cinque.”
Giovanni slipped away but other faces rose from the darkness to take his place.
Tessa. Jill. Zack. Mzatal. Ryan. Jekki. Eilahn.
People. My people.
My family.
I woke with a start, pulse stuttering as the fragments of the dream scattered. “People,” I gasped. “Family.” I scrabbled for the recorder, scanned through it, seeking the sentence. Found it, listened, then listened again.
“I care about you, and I don’t want to see you or Lord Mzatal hurt. But you find me, and the shit’s going to hit the fan and people will get hurt.”
“Fucking shit.” I played it one more time to hear the slight emphasis on “people.” I threw the covers off and ran down the hall, yanked the basement door open and flew halfway down the stairs before realizing I couldn’t see a goddamn thing. “Ryan!” I shouted as I ran back up the steps, flicked the switch at the top of the stairs then scrambled back down as fluorescent light filled the basement. “Ryan! Wake up!”
He jerked upright. “What? Shit!” He threw an arm over his eyes to shield them from the glare. “What’s wrong?”
“I need you to look something up.” I snatched his laptop from the end table and thrust it at him. “Idris said he didn’t want to see me or Mzatal hurt. Then he said if we looked for him, the shit would hit the fan and people would get hurt. People. Not just Mzatal and me. The first people who come to mind are his family.” I continued to hold the laptop out for him while I shifted impatiently from foot to foot like a pee-pee dance. “I need you to find out what you can about his family. Close members first. Then you need to do your FBI shit and get them into a safe house until this blows over.” I made a frustrated noise. “Damn it! Why didn’t I think of this earlier?”
“Whoa. Slow down.” He rubbed a hand across his eyes, tucked the sheet around his waist then took the computer from me and settled it on his lap. “Gimme a sec to catch up.”
I paced back and forth on the rug in front of the futon. “I know he has two older sisters. Both his parents are alive, and at least one grandmother. No idea about extended family.” This was the family who’d adopted him when he was fourteen, after the parents who’d adopted him when he was a baby had been killed in a car accident. Even though Idris had been with the Palatinos for less than a decade, I knew he’d fully embraced them as family, as real as any he might’ve been born to.
“I’m working on it, hotshot.” He flicked a glance up as he typed, then raked a more thorough gaze over me. “I like the new look.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.
I stopped my pacing, looked down, then rolled my eyes. I still had on what I’d worn to bed: pink tank top and blue panties. No bra. “Oh great. Nearly naked,” I groaned, though I couldn’t fully hide my own amusement.
“Yes, you are.” The smile lingered on his mouth, then he dropped his eyes to his screen.
“It’s not fair.” I plopped onto the futon to watch him type. “I’ve never seen you nearly naked.”
“I’m naked right now,” he told me, eyes still on the screen, though the skin around them crinkled in amusement, “but I have the sense to keep the sheet over me. It might be too much for you.”
“I can take anything you dish out,” I shot back, grinning. If the view from the waist up was any indication, I had no doubt he’d look good naked.
“I do love a challenge,” he murmured with a low chuckle, working the touch pad and clicking on stuff. “Here we go. Sister, Amber Palatino Gavin. Sister, Rose Palatino. Parents, Angela and Jerome Palatino. All in the Seattle area. Maternal grandmother, paternal grandfather living. Definitely extended family. Aunts, uncles, cousins.”
I nodded. “Let’s focus on the immediate family. Can you get them to a safe spot?”
He gave me a reassuring nod, then glanced at the clock on the end table. “Five-fifteen a.m. I need to connect with Zack. Is he up?”
“No clue,” I lied. I had every confidence he was awake since the demahnk slept about as infrequently as the lords did, but Ryan only knew Zack as human. “He’s usually up before me anyway. I’ll go make coffee and see if I can find him.”
Ryan gave an absent nod, already doing stuff on his laptop again.
I returned upstairs, looked out the back window and was unsurprised to see Zack nimbly climbing over the high wall of the new obstacle course, neck and neck with Eilahn in the predawn light. I turned back to the kitchen and got a pot of coffee going, and a few minutes later I heard a thump on the roof as Eilahn found her favorite spot, and the simultaneous creak of the back door as Zack entered.
“Hey, Zack.” I held out a towel and gave him the rundown of my morning revelations and suspicions while he wiped off a sheen of sweat and mud. “And now Ryan needs your help to arrange a safe house.”
“Good work,” he said with an approving nod. “I’ll go check with him.”
“Thanks.” I grimaced. “I want to be sure they’re safe.”
He gave me a reassuring smile. “We’ll do everything we can. I promise.” He tossed the towel neatly through the laundry room door and into the hamper, then headed down into the basement.
I set to work cleaning the kitchen in an effort to channel my angst and worry. Unfortunately, Zack and Ryan kept the kitchen fairly spotless, and the three minutes it took to empty the dishwasher and wipe down the counters didn’t do much to ease my mood.
I pulled an egg carton from the fridge then fumbled it, barely hearing the squish-crunch of eggs meeting the floor as a truly horrible thought occurred to me. “Zack! Ryan!” Ignoring the mess, I ran for the steps and bounded down. “Check to see if any of his family are missing. One of his sisters? A cousin?”