Covet (2 page)

I covered his hand with one of mine and tapped numbers on the plane’s phone with the thumb of my free hand.

My home phone rang four times, then the answering machine clicked on. I glanced at my watch, which was still set on Central Standard Time. It was 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday. Nanna, whom my mother and I had lived with most of my life, should be home and getting ready for church. As our church’s pianist, she never missed the Sunday service. Why wasn’t she answering?

I tried again, thinking maybe Nanna was in her room getting dressed. Again, I got the answering machine. Unease crept in as I left a message.

I called my mother’s cell phone next. At least her whereabouts weren’t a mystery. She was probably still on her latest sales trip.

Mom answered on the first ring, making me jump. Unlike Nanna, Mom seldom had a signal while she was delivering safety products and chemicals to forestry clients out in the fields and woods.

“Oh, hey, Mom. Just wanted to let you know I’m okay and—”

“Savannah! Oh thank God. I, we, your grandma…” She was on the verge of shrieking, her normally low voice pitched high enough to hurt my ears and make me wince. “I’m on my way home now. But I’m still hours away from Jacksonville and—”

My hands convulsed around both the phone and Tristan’s hand. “Whoa, Mom, slow down. What’s going on?”

Eyebrows pinched with concern, Tristan flipped his hand under mine and laced our fingers together. Grateful for something strong and solid to hold on to, I squeezed his hand.

“Sav, they took Nanna! They called me, and—”

“Wait a minute. Who took her?” What little warmth my body had drawn from Tristan’s drained away. Had the vamp council gone after my grandmother now?

“The Clann. They called me, asking about that Coleman boy as if I would know where he is. For some reason, they think you two are involved. I tried to tell them it was a mistake, that you’d never break the rules like that. But they didn’t believe me.”

Oh God. The Clann knew. Dylan must have told them he’d caught Tristan and me kissing after dance team practice Friday night.

I eased my hand away from Tristan’s and back into my own lap. Frowning, Tristan sat forward on the edge of the couch, resting his elbows on his knees as he watched me.

“They insisted he was with you,” Mom continued. “I told them he couldn’t be, that you were on a trip with your father, and they went crazy! They said they have your Nanna, and they won’t release her until we bring the Coleman boy back. I tried calling her, but she’s not answering.”

Holy crap. “Mom, hang on. Let me get Dad.”

Dad must have been listening at the front end of the cabin, because he immediately joined us and took the phone. While Mom filled him in, I returned Tristan’s stare and tried to absorb my mother’s words.

“The Clann…they’ve kidnapped my grandmother,” I whispered, hardly able to believe the words coming out of my mouth even as I said them.

“They wouldn’t do that,” Tristan insisted. “There’s been a mistake.”

I told him word for word what my mother had said. By the time I finished, his face had turned pale and his left knee was bouncing out a rhythm only a hummingbird could appreciate.

“I’ll fix this,” he promised. “Let me use the phone and I’ll call my parents.”

“Joan, we are half an hour from the Rusk landing strip now,” Dad told my mother. “I will straighten this out and call you back when I have news.” He ended the call then handed the phone to Tristan.

Tristan tried reaching his father first, then his mother and even his sister, Emily. Scowling, he tried a few other descendants’ home and cell phones. No one was answering.

“I don’t understand. Wouldn’t they be waiting for your call?” I said.

“Yeah, they should be. Unless…” Tristan looked away for a moment, then his gaze snapped back to mine, his jaw clenching. “Unless they’re already meeting at the Circle and using power. If they’ve raised enough power together, sometimes it blocks incoming radio and cell phone signals.”

“Why would they be raising a lot of power?” I asked, hopeful the Clann did this at all their meetings for ceremonial purposes or something.

Tristan stared at me in silent answer, and my stomach twisted.

This wasn’t the norm for the Clann. Which meant they were doing something to Nanna…

Bile burned the back of my throat, and I couldn’t look at him anymore. If anything happened to Nanna, if Tristan’s fellow descendants did something to her to try and find Tristan, the fault would be ours. We’d broken the rules to be together. I’d thought the vampire council was our only real worry, that the Clann couldn’t do anything more to my family since we’d already been cast out due to my Clann mother marrying my vamp father before my birth.

I was wrong. And now Nanna was paying for it.

“Take your seats and put on your seat belts,” Dad muttered, breaking the long silence. “We are landing.”

I avoided making eye contact with both him and Tristan as we moved to the recliners and belted in, then gripped the armrests as my heartbeat hammered in my chest.

Please don’t let it be too late
, I prayed.

As soon as the jet touched ground and finished a short taxi, I unbuckled my seat belt and jumped up. Dad was faster, though, reaching the door before I could even blink. He got it open and the stairs unfolded so we could run down them to the rental car he’d called ahead and had delivered. The sky, which should have been a bright spring blue, was an ominous shade of dark gray, the storm clouds blackening out the sunlight so much it appeared to be almost dusk. Wind whipped my curly hair into an untamable red cloud, using the strands to slap first one side of my face then the other.

I got into the rental car’s backseat, Tristan right behind me. Automatically I reached for his hand then froze. We were six miles outside of Jacksonville now. I’d promised the council I would break up with Tristan once we were home.

Not yet. Not till we sorted out this situation with Nanna and the Clann.

At my hesitation, Tristan glanced at me and frowned. “We’re going to fix this, Sav.” He squeezed my hand.

Forcing a nod, I swallowed hard against the knot tightening in my throat and looked out the window as Dad took off north on Highway 69 for Jacksonville, going fast enough to make the pine-tree-covered hills feel like a roller-coaster ride through the woods.

I spent the trip into town silently wrestling with the guilt crawling over my skin and clawing at my insides.

What had I done?

I never should have let Tristan talk me into breaking the rules with him. If I hadn’t, Nanna would be safe right now.

And yet I couldn’t even begin to imagine going through life without having felt Tristan’s love. What we’d shared was a part of me now. It had changed everything…how I looked at the world and the future, how I felt about myself and others. When I was with Tristan, I felt solid and real and grounded and…good. Like being half vamp and half Clann was just circumstance, not who I really was. Like I could become anything
I
chose, not what others chose for me.

Except that wasn’t true, because I couldn’t change or choose what I was. Believing otherwise was every bit as much a lie as the ones I’d told my family for the last six months in order to be with Tristan. Which meant, no matter how much Tristan and I loved each other, this relationship was wrong. It was a selfish love that had nearly killed Tristan and might be hurting Nanna even now.

How had I gotten here?

I used to think of myself as a good person. But the truth was I was a monster inside and out, and not just because my vamp side was starting to take over. How many people had I hurt? Maybe I could excuse accidentally gaze dazing those boys from my algebra class last year, and even gaze dazing my first boyfriend, Greg Stanwick. I hadn’t understood what I was then. But I had always known dating Tristan was wrong, and still I had made that choice over and over for months. There was no excuse for it, no matter how wonderful it had felt.

I just prayed I had the strength and enough time left to fix what I had done.

Once we reached the center of Jacksonville, Tristan directed Dad to turn right on Canada Street and stay on it all the way out of town past our high school and still farther to the Coleman house, where apparently the Circle was located. Today was the first time I’d even heard of the Clann’s secret meeting place.

I knew when we reached the edge of the Coleman property, because all the houses on the right side of the road ended. Five minutes later, Dad slowed the car and turned onto a gravel driveway barred by a huge wrought-iron gate. Tristan rolled down his window, leaned out and punched in a code on a pad housed on a gunmetal-gray pole near the driver’s side window. The gate slowly rolled open.

I wanted to jump out and shove it open faster.

The driveway was long and curving, lined with some type of hardwood trees I couldn’t recognize in the gloom, their branches lashing in the wind. A few raindrops pattered on the windshield and roof. Dad didn’t bother to turn on the wipers. The trees ended suddenly as the drive circled in front of a three-story brownstone mansion, its every light blazing. I tried not to compare it to Nanna’s single-story, single-bathroom, three-bedroom brick home where I’d grown up.

At least thirty or more vehicles lined the drive in front of the house. We added one more to the collection as Dad parked. We got out of the car, and Tristan led us around the outside of his house. More threatening raindrops fell, surprisingly cool on my skin despite the humidity. Once in the dark backyard, we all broke into a jog. I had time to recognize the yard as the same one in the dreams Tristan and I had shared many times over the last few months. Then we plunged into the even darker forest that ringed the yard. As soon as we did, I could feel it…a too-familiar prickling sensation of pins and needles down my neck and arms. Youch. A sure sign that descendants were using power nearby.

The woods seemed familiar, intensely so, as if I knew the location and size of every pine needle above me and just how the springy green moss below my feet would feel if I weren’t wearing shoes. The moss grew everywhere, carpeting the forest floor and growing up the sides of the pines. When I caught glimpses of the clearing up ahead, I realized where I was.

This couldn’t be the Circle.

We were in Tristan’s and my dream woods, the ones where we met when our minds connected while we were asleep. Even the clearing was almost exactly the same. There was the stream, which ran across the mossy circular clearing where we’d danced and talked for hours. But where was the short waterfall that always spilled past the boulders and fed the stream? Maybe that had been an imaginary addition from Tristan?

Both sides of the stream were filled with descendants, too many of them to count. They gathered like giant crows circled round the harvest, their faces hidden in shadow beneath their blue and black umbrellas. Had my mother come here as a young girl with Nanna for the Clann meetings, maybe carrying her own dark umbrella in case it rained? It would explain why Mom liked to work in the forestry industry…she’d grown up trampling through woods rain or shine for social gatherings.

On the far bank of the stream, where in our dreams Tristan and I usually sat or lay on a picnic blanket talking, sat a stone chair occupied by Tristan’s dad, the Clann’s leader, Sam Coleman. Behind him hovered Tristan’s mother, Nancy, and Tristan’s sister, Emily.

Yep, this was definitely the Circle. And we were so in trouble.

Then I looked up and gasped. Floating several feet above the stream, as if hung by invisible wires, was Nanna.

CHAPTER 2

TRISTAN

Savannah’s grandmother, Mrs. Evans, appeared to be awake but immobilized in the air. The Clann must have caught her before she could get dressed; her long cotton nightgown floated around her legs and bare feet in slow motion as if she were a ghost. Savannah took a step toward her, and the descendants began to mutter. Hearing them, Savannah froze, her eyes narrowing and turning moss-green. A sure sign she was beyond ticked off.

“Mom, Dad, what are you doing?” I shouted to be heard over the wind and across the Circle’s clearing. I had to put a stop to this before somebody got hurt.

“Tristan!” Mom screamed, darting out from behind Dad’s throne. She took two steps toward me then stopped, her joyous smile flashing into shock, then fear, and finally settling into horror as she stared at Savannah. “No, it can’t be true. Tristan, how could you? I told them you would never—”

“Son, do you know what she is? What her father is?” Dad’s voice boomed throughout the clearing. “They’re—”

“I know,” I said. “But obviously I’m fine. There’s no need to do this. Let her grandmother go.”

Savannah looked up at her trapped grandmother again. Mrs. Evans’s papery face twisted horribly, as if she were silently screaming in pain. Eyes shining with unshed tears, Savannah reached for her grandmother’s feet, but even her toes were out of Savannah’s reach.

This was insane. What did the Clann think it was doing, dragging an old lady out of her own home and off to the woods in her nightgown? Mrs. Evans would have every right to hex us all the minute they freed her.

“Let her down,” I yelled, losing control over my temper.

The wind died, but the smell of ozone sharpened the air with the promise of more rain.

In the resulting silence, Dad said, “It’s not that simple.”

What?

Rocking back on my heels, I searched his face for some clue as to what he could possibly be thinking. I could tell from his overly formal tone that he was still in Clann leader mode, probably too aware of the audience of descendants surrounding us. But he wasn’t thinking right. This wasn’t about Clann and vamp politics. No matter what, no matter how powerful the Clann was, we didn’t do
this
.

“It is simple,” I said. “This woman had nothing to do with my disappearance.”

“We know where you were,” Dad said. “We know the vampires—that…girl’s father—kidnapped you. Now tell us the truth, son. Are you okay? Did they hurt you? What questions did they ask you? Are they trying to figure out our weaknesses?”