Harnessed Angels: The Quickening Read online

  “A little too late to go all prissy and dignified, don’t you think?” he asked. “Especially after the fucking show you put on last night—or should I say ‘fuck-show’?”

  “Vague statements aren’t going to move this conversation forward, Patrick.” She whipped the words into the phone. Her face flushed an irate red and her grip on the phone tightened to the point that the receiver began to shake against her ear.

  “Hurukan!” Patrick yelled into the phone.

  “What?” Sara asked. She had jerked the phone from her ear but brought it back immediately to yell her return question. That coddled little prick. He doesn’t know what he’s in for if he thinks he can talk to me like this.

  “Mathias Hurukan.” Patrick delivered the name in a one, two, accusatory punch. “Or didn’t you bother getting his name when he was dry-fucking you last night?”

  Dry-fucking. The idea brought a sly, wistful smile to Sara’s face as she clamped down on the chuckle that wanted to escape. Anything but dry. She remembered the slick slide of his thumbs into her wet pussy. She closed her eyes, saw the thick, heavy outline of his erection. Her cunt ached at the memory.

  “Well?” Patrick, insistent, petulant, demanded her response.

  She had to physically shake away the image and remembered touch of Mathias before she could answer Patrick. “What I do, what guy I do,” she added with sarcastic glee, “has never been any of your business.”

  Silence greeted her, lasted so long she thought he might have walked away from the phone. She was ready to hang up when his voice, conciliatory and dazed, spoke softly into her ear. “They’re just using you, Sara,” he said. His words issued in broken spurts and were bathed in a wet edge. “To get to me, keep me in line.”

  “They are?” Sara asked. She had regained her composure, her curiosity suddenly piqued. “What do you mean by ‘they’?”

  “O’Tethra and Hurukan,” he answered, his voice still quietly yielding and very near to tears. “How can you be so fucking stupid, Sara? When we’re so close to having everything we want?”

  Sara’s stomach flipped a few times and she rested her forehead against her knees as a wave of nausea and bile foamed in her throat. “There is no ‘we,’ Patrick.” She voiced the reminder softly, in an oft-repeated, exhausted tone. Near tears herself, she gulped a lungful of air and exhaled slowly.

  “Of course there is, Sara.” He responded without his usual indulgence. “You know that, you’re just trying to avoid the real issue—”

  The composure she had struggled to regain shattered and she launched into a tirade. “Yes, Patrick, it is the real issue, it’s the whole fucking issue! There has never been a ‘we,’ an ‘us,’ a ‘Patrick and Sara,’ and as for those two bastards, if this is some silly Skull and Bones bullshit…” Sara paused to consider the possibility.

  “Is it?” she asked. Colm participating in some prank or cloak and dagger game, she could see, but not Mathias. Despite the seductive danger he kept shielded behind his dark eyes, he seemed different.

  Patrick’s response before he hung up the phone was cold, formal and furious. “I-will-be-in-touch-with-you-later.”

  Sara slammed down the receiver and switched on her laptop before she stalked over to her dresser. She slipped into green silk underwear and a matching bra, followed by an olive green T-shirt and cargo shorts. Padding into the common room she shared with three other girls, she pulled a juice and yogurt from the refrigerator before yanking a banana from the clump on the counter and stalking back into her room to slam the door. She had, thankfully, been the last one up that morning and none of her roommates had been there to overhear her phone call, or argument, with Patrick.

  Once Sara was logged into the school’s intranet, she searched for addresses on Colm and Mathias. A slow chill settled over her when she saw that both resided at 1285 Abincourt Road. She did a reverse look-up on the address but found no other listings. She did a web search of their names next. 'O’Tethra' yielded nothing and so she shortened it to 'Tethra'.

  “What the…” Sara clicked through the results pages for Colm. All the links were for Celtic mythology pages. She punched in a search for Mathias, using only his last name and getting similar results. Outside of gamer references, she found only pages on Mayan mythology. Cursing herself for not recognizing the names sooner, she did a phone-listing search for the United States and came up empty for both last names.

  Returning to the school’s intranet, she accessed all available information on both men. Both were graduate students, but Mathias was studying bioengineering, while Colm was taking Ancient Studies. They possessed two disparate profiles despite their acknowledged familiarity with one another, their penchant for being at the same place at the same general time, and their shared residence.

  Shutting down the computer, Sara looked at the notepad next to her: 1285 Abincourt Road. The little ghost of a gravedigger from summers past began to shift excitedly beneath her skin. It was time, she told herself, to make a little house call.

  Chapter Five

  1285 Abincourt Road was six blocks from the school’s east gate. The subdivision bordered a small lake, and most of the houses were on wooded lots of three to five acres. A jogging path ran along the lakeshore, providing access to many of the backyards. Sara drove by the house on Abincourt and noted Colm’s white Vette in the semi-circle drive. The doors to the three-car garage were open, giving Sara a quick glimpse of the garage’s empty interior.

  Parking her car at one of the administrative buildings by the gate, Sara found the nearest access path to the lake. As she walked, the green nylon hip pack she wore bounced against her leg, the pack’s metallic contents clanging softly from colliding with one another. Sara put a hand over the pack to still its movement. The presence of her dig tools reassured her and she fingered their familiar shapes through the nylon covering. The small, slim picks poked at the fabric and she shifted them back into place, remembering how many locks, over the years, she had managed to open. There was, of course, a huge difference between the bronze locks of ancient Rome and the type of lock she was likely to find on the doors of 1285 Abincourt Road. Not to mention, picking those old locks or carrying these tools on a dig wasn’t illegal.

  Approaching the house’s lot, she slowed her pace. The trees grew heavy and close on the lot and she slipped into a copse that kept her hidden from both the joggers on the path and anyone who might be looking from the house’s many windows. A small terrace jutted from one side of the house, its French doors thrown open to allow the early autumn air inside. There was no ground level door at the rear of the house, but she noticed a set of outside stairs disappearing down to the basement level.

  Crouched among the trees, Sara’s legs began to cramp while she waited to see who would leave or who would arrive. A few ants found her and she slapped at them, wondering how long she could stay in the underbrush before she was discovered, or before some blood-sucking tick latched onto one of her bare legs. The sound of the Vette’s engine revving brought a grateful sigh. She looked up and saw that someone had closed the terrace doors. Colm’s Vette, complete with Colm, was pulling onto Abincourt Road.

  Watching the house, Sara searched for any signs that someone was still inside. The curtains were closed. No glimmer of artificial light peeked through. Scanning the street and the house, she decided that the basement entrance was her best choice—other than going back to her dorm room and trying to forget Mathias and Colm and their little game with Patrick. The terrace doors, if they had an outside lock, would be easiest, but that side of the house was too exposed to the street. With one last glance at the windows, Sara stood up and skirted the trees until she could no longer see, or be seen from, the street. Then she walked a quick, straight line to the staircase that led down to the basement.

  The staircase, combined with the roof’s overhang, threw dark shadows on the basement door and obscured the doorknob. She was pleasantly surprised to see that there wasn’t a deadbolt, but was equally w
orried that the absence of the deadbolt indicated a chain or bar on the other side. She put her ear to the door and listened for sounds in the room beyond. Only silence came through, so she put her hand on the doorknob and turned it on the off chance it was unlocked. It wasn’t.

  Going to work on the lock, she pulled a penlight and several of the slimmer digging picks from the hip pack. The lock was old, most likely from the 1960s, when the subdivision was put in. Hoping there wasn’t a bar or chain to keep her out, she held the penlight between her teeth and inserted the first pick. The locking mechanism was a simple spring and, as the first pick pressed against the release, Sara heard the satisfying metal sproing of the lock button popping on the other side of the door.

  She placed the penlight and picks inside the hip pack. Again, she put one ear to the door and listened intently before she slowly rotated the doorknob and pushed inward. The door, hinges creaking, opened. Sara stepped through and quickly closed the door, pitching the room into complete darkness. Heart pounding so hard it made her fingers tremble, she unzipped the pack and retrieved the penlight. She hesitated a moment before flicking the light on, her imagination wildly inventing a roomful of dreadful contents that were better left in the dark.

  Sara widened the beam of light and its edges picked up a door at the opposite end of the room. She thought she had noticed window casings along the outside of the house and she flashed the light along the walls to find that the windows were boarded from the inside. She tiptoed across the room and listened at the door. She had been, she realized as she turned a slow circle to examine the room, in noisier tombs.

  The basement was all but empty. A single light bulb, with its dangling pull chain, hung from the ceiling by a cord. Three wooden crates, each around four cubic feet, lined one wall. The center crate was open, its lid on the floor and packing straw spilling over the top edge. She let the penlight’s beam play over the crates. The name of a familiar Middle East freight handler that specialized in museum shipments was stamped in bold red lettering just above the 'Fragile' notice.

  “Interesting, at last,” Sara whispered, her rapid heartbeat contradicting her feigned nonchalance.

  The crate on the left appeared a few inches taller than the other two and she crossed the room to examine it. A piece of canvas, near in color to the wood, covered the crate. Sara lifted the cloth to reveal a clay tablet. Her heart slowed, dropped a backbeat and she reached out to touch the uneven break line along the right edge. She traced the glyphs that served as a border, her mind casting back to the last time she had seen such a piece.

  “Recognize it?”

  Sara jerked and spun around. The penlight fell to the floor and rolled to a stop in the center of the basement, where it illuminated a pair of running shoes and blue jeans. A man’s hand, pale and lightly covered with fine, reddish-blond hair, scooped the light up and flashed Sara in the eyes.

  Fighting her rising panic, Sara resisted the urge to shield her eyes. “Colm…” she began but hesitated as he moved closer. She took a step back, her hip pack bumping against the crate. How the hell had he come back without her hearing?

  “I hope you’re not going to ask me what I’m doing here,” he said and took another step forward.

  She had been ready to ask such a question and her only response was a mute stare. She tried to back up but the crates blocked her. The dig tools in her hip pack pressed against her, the picks threatening to poke through. She casually dropped one hand to the pack but Colm saw the movement, grabbed her arm and roughly turned her in a circle. He trapped her between his body and the crates with her right arm pulled across her breasts so that both arms were immobile. His chest pushed against her back and his pelvis pressed tight against her ass.

  “Let’s just get back to my original question, shall we?” His mouth hovered next to her ear and his tongue darted out to lave the lobe before he nipped it. She could feel his prick hardening against her, the bulge in his pants molding itself to the curve of her cheeks.

  “Do you recognize the tablet?” he asked again, jerking her body with each syllable so that her hips banged against the crate.

  “What are you doing with this—it’s museum quality,” Sara said. Pain arced through her pelvic bone and she tried turning to face him, but his impossibly strong arms kept her fixed in place.

  “That wasn’t the question,” Colm whispered with cold menace as he jarred her body against the crate again.

  Impotent fury, heavy and throbbing, coursed through Sara. She struggled against him. His excitement, evidenced by the hard press of his cock against her ass, only intensified. His grip tightened on her arm until she was sure the bone would snap.

  “Colm, please, think about what you’re doing.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but the words came out in an urgent, pleading whimper that shamed and further enraged her.

  “Think about what I’m doing?” He ground his cock against Sara’s backbone and reached with his free hand to tear at the neck of her T-shirt.

  She felt the sharp scrape of teeth against her collarbone and growled in frustration. She let her body go limp to force Colm to relax his grip. But he held her, suspended, like an old rag doll.

  “I’ll get my answers from you one way or another, Sara,” he growled.

  She felt his mouth zero in on the hollow of her neck as he wrapped an arm around her waist and lifted her higher.

  “No chance for you to say ‘no’ this time.” Colm sank his teeth into Sara’s neck.

  Pain, liquid hot, spurted from her body and into his mouth. Sucking, gulping, his encircling arm pumping her body for more, Colm willed Sara to open her mind to him. Her ass slid up and down his zippered crotch as he pumped, his breathing heavy and hot against her neck. Still, she resisted, but he continued to push and pump, his teeth sinking deeper into her neck as she screamed her final denial.

  Chapter Six

  The fragment of a stone tablet lay in the center of a wooden table. All but one side was rounded, smooth. The left side, while time worn, ran a zigzag pattern. A series of purposeful lines and curves formed a border, their apparent randomness and only occasional repetition suggesting writing instead of merely decorative symbols. The tablet’s main inset was a continuous stream of writing at once familiar but completely foreign. Sara had been standing over the tablet, her father, Jefferson, beside her, for more than two hours.

  “This shouldn’t be here,” Jefferson mumbled for the third time that hour. The humid Yucatan air had him drenched in sweat and he wiped at his brow and upper lip with a damp handkerchief.

  Sara chewed her bottom lip. She had stopped asking her father questions after the first half hour. He had become snappish as the tablet continued to confuse and worry him. The inset language didn’t bother him that much. It obviously was an early precursor to the Hebrew alphabet and used a pictographic script common some four thousand years ago. But it was at the base of Mount Pecaya, a Yucatan archaeological dig site, and the layer it had been taken from was only two thousand years old, give or take a century.

  “Did you get this?” Jefferson asked and pointed to the center section of the break line where there appeared to have been a second inset, with only half a square and a curved line remaining.

  “Yes,” Sara answered.

  He frowned at her, his lips poised to ask the question a second time. She snorted and raised the camera’s viewfinder to her eye. She shot a dozen more frames at different angles to make sure a three-dimensional composite image could be built if necessary. Her face softened as she looked at her father, hunched over the tablet in detailed inspection. Since her mother’s death three years ago, when Sara was fourteen, she was the only person both sufficiently patient and qualified to be her father’s dig assistant. Still, she sighed and put the camera back in its case, she missed the days when she had been free to roam the dig sites and come back at the end of a long day to curl up beside her mother while the other woman catalogued the day’s discoveries. Tonight, Sara would be the one making
entries, alone in her tent.

  A flat upward thrust slammed into Sara’s stomach. At the same time, her neck cramped and she looked up to see her father’s questioning gaze, his lip’s moving wordlessly as his features started to melt into a black background.

  “That’s not what I wanted, Sara!” Colm yelled and dropped Sara to the basement floor. She felt a rib crack as she hit, and she tried to raise her body. A scream ripped from her throat as the pain threatened to make her pass out.

  In the dark room, she sensed Colm bending down beside her, felt his hands on her hair, lifting her head. She wanted to ask if he was going to kill her, but her throat and lips were too dry. Inside her mouth, her tongue felt like an inflated balloon, its powdered surface rubbing against the dry leather of her gums.

  “No, Sara,” Colm answered her unspoken question. “I’m not going to kill you. Not today, at least.”

  She felt her hip being tugged and realized he had opened her hip pack. Her penlight was on the floor again, abandoned nearby, showing her a slim palette knife, almost invisible in the darkened room, rising in an arc before curving down to slash the skin on Colm’s wrist. He raised the wrist, bleeding, salty, wet, to her shriveled lips.

  Sara latched onto the wrist with her mouth. Her fingers encircled his arm despite the bright pain in her chest that threatened to explode and consume her in its blast. As she sucked greedily at the miserly flow of blood, she offered up a silent prayer and promise. Whatever I become, keep my soul clean.

  “Stupid bitch.” Colm wrenched her protesting mouth and hands from his wrist and tossed her back onto the floor. “Souls! For fuck’s sake, I’ve had to listen to that shit for nineteen hundred years!”