"How's Claire hanging in down there in Newport?" Gideon asked, looking over from his continued experiments on the UV collars across the room from her in the tech lab.
"She's all right. She's safe, and things are quiet for now."
While the rest of the compound was glued to television reports of the Rogue attacks, Jenna and Gideon had thrown themselves into their work. After the inadvertent detonation of the other collar, he had chased down the programmical key to all of the collar activation sequences. Gideon had even managed to get one of the collars in his collection to show up on a GPS map, which had him very excited. It helped, having something to do besides wait for word, and then wait some more.
Jenna rubbed at the ache in her glyph-marked neck, a product of too many hours without sleep and too much worry about Brock and rest of the Order. Worry for the entire world, in fact. Nothing else seemed important at all in light of the events of the past twenty-four hours. At least everyone she cared for was safe and accounted for. "Lucan and Mathias Rowan sent a pair of Agents down to Newport to guard the Darkhaven while Reichen is overseas. Claire says she's in good hands."
Gideon nodded. "Glad to hear it. I gather she was able to do some digging into the question of her parents' deaths before all hell broke loose last night?"
"Yeah," Jenna replied. "That's why she called, actually, aside from letting us know she's okay. Claire contacted the relief organization her mom worked for back in the fifties and they looked up information about the rebel raid on the village. It turns out several people were killed that day, three from the relief organization and four more from the village."
"Claire's father being one of them?" When she shrugged, Gideon set down the broken ring of black polymer he'd been working on. With lowered brows, he regarded her over the rims of small, pale blue sunglasses perched on the end of his nose. "Claire's father wasn't killed?" "No one seems able to say for sure. According to accounts at the time from the villagers who witnessed the raid, he was shot multiple times. Mortally wounded, the same as Claire's mother and the others."
"But?" Gideon prompted, scowling now.
"But there's no record of his body being recovered."
"Holy shit."
"Yeah." Jenna shook her head, still a bit numbed by the idea. "He was declared dead like the rest of the victims and simply ceased to exist from that day forward. For all anyone knows, he could have gotten up and walked away."
"Not if he was mortal," Gideon replied, his eyes serious, devoid of doubt.
"Right." This news from Claire had only added to Jenna's certainty that she was on the right track. If it weren't for Dylan's steadfast insistence that her father was just an average, human, run-of-the-mill ass**le, all the question marks on Jenna's theory would be eliminated.
"Jen?" As if conjured by thought alone, Dylan now stood in the open doorway of the tech lab. She looked shell-shocked and pale. In her hand was a yellowed square of paper.
"Hey," Jenna said, getting up to meet her. Dylan looked so stricken and upset, Jenna pulled her into a tight hug. "What's wrong? Did something happen?"
The Breedmate's eyes were searching, a little lost. "With everything that's going on, I guess I was feeling kind of homesick today. I started missing my mom. After she died last year, I took a small box of mementos from her apartment. I hadn't looked through all of it, just enough to see that it contained some letters and postcards, souvenirs from her travels. Silly things, really. She was sentimental, had the most open, loving heart I've ever known."
Jenna brought Dylan inside and guided her to the empty desk chair. "Tell me what this is about."
"I just went through everything in that box. At the bottom, I found a sealed envelope. This was inside it." She placed the piece of paper on the desk. Something was written in the upper right corner in loopy, buoyant handwriting: Zael. Mykonos, '75. Dylan stared up at Jenna meaningfully. "I was born the following year."
No question what she was getting at. "But your mom and dad were already married, I thought. You have two older brothers."
Dylan nodded. "And in 1975, my mom left for a few months. She went to Greece all by herself, just picked up and left. She told me a few years ago that she'd wanted to divorce my dad, but he begged her to take him back. But she never told me about this. She never told me about him."
Dylan flipped the piece of paper over. It was a close-up photograph of an impossibly beautiful man, bare-chested and tanned golden brown, sitting on a white sand beach. His sensual mouth curved in a knee-melting smile for the person who took the snapshot, presumably Dylan's mother.
"You think she had an affair with this guy?"
"Yeah," she said. "I'd say the odds are pretty damn good."
Jenna picked the photo up so she could look closer. Purely for clarification purposes, of course. She stared transfixed at the flawless, muscular body and the mane of copper-shot blond hair. His face was unlined, ageless. His dark-lashed eyes were piercing blue, the color of tropical, turquoise waters. Wise and unearthly.
And slung around his strong wrist was a tooled leather band with a hammered silver emblem affixed to it ... a teardrop suspended over the cradle of a crescent moon.
TAVIA'S STOMACH LURCHED as the black helicopter swooped down over the sunlit water toward an isolated, tree-choked island several miles off the coast of Maine. Twenty minutes after the Minion at the police station had contacted Dragos, the dark-suited pilot, also Minion, arrived to take her to a private helipad at the top of a Boston high-rise.