Dark Deceiver - Pamela Palmer

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      “Positive.” Autumn shoved the keys and her cold fists deep into her pockets. “He said they’d find them all.”

      “We thought there was only one. We have only one.”

      “Yeah. That’s why I thought it might be important.”

      “I really wish you hadn’t let him go, Autumn.”

      Autumn met her friend’s rueful gaze. “Me, too.”

      “There’s Jack! Did you catch him?” she called to her husband, but he just shook his head.

      As Larsen ran to join her husband, Autumn turned to make her way to the car, her heart heavy with the knowledge she’d finally gotten the chance she’d been longing for. A chance to make a difference. To be a hero.

      And she’d blown it. Not only had she failed to be of help, she’d become something far, far worse.

      She’d become a liability the Sitheen could not afford.

      Two weeks later, as the sun set amidst painted clouds, Kaderil strode across the busy street near the D.C. waterfront to the squeal of brakes and the honks of impatient human drivers. He’d learned enough during his short time in the human realm to know he was expected to give way to the vehicles, but he’d spent fifteen centuries making others—powerful immortals—cower before him.

      He refused now to submit to humans, regardless of the armor they wore, though he had to admit to a certain fascination with this armor. Cars, they called them. And trucks, minivans, SUVs, convertibles. The humans had a different name for nearly every one and he knew them all.

      A cold breeze ruffled his hair as he stepped onto the curb and started across the parking lot to the low-slung building of the marina’s offices. The human world was not what he’d expected. The humans were not the unintelligent, animal-like beings of Esrian legend. When they were free from enchantment, they were, in fact, surprisingly quick of mind. Much to his relief, he’d discovered that he possessed some small talents against them, talents he hadn’t expected. Although he could not fully enchant them as other Esri could, he was able to push thoughts into their heads and borrow knowledge from their brains with a single touch.

      Knowledge that had told him he needed documents and a fictitious background that would withstand thorough investigation if he wanted any hope of fooling the Sitheen. A single misstep and he could well find himself burning beneath a death curse.

      He’d bullied Ustanis, the third in their party, into setting up his documents and history since he was fully capable of enchanting the humans, forcing them to do his will, and Kaderil was not. It had taken Ustanis nearly a fortnight to accomplish the task, though Kaderil suspected Zander had played a large part in the delay.

      He’d worried that a month would be too little time to infiltrate the Sitheen and earn their trust. Now he had only two short weeks.

      His stomach burned with tension. The only thing the slave had been able to tell him about the Sitheen was a name, Larsen Vale, and this place, the Top Sail Marina in downtown D.C. They were his only clues. If he failed to find her here, his mission might be lost before he ever started.

      Hoping that wasn’t the case, he strode up the path toward the door that said Office. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, caging the Punisher. It was a struggle to fight the deeply ingrained need to fling bodies and demand fear, but he was learning. Humans were fragile creatures, far too easily alarmed by violence. And he had to pretend to be human.

      Kaderil opened the door and walked into the marina office.

      A solitary, bearded man glanced up from behind the long counter. “Can I help you?”

      Kaderil forced his mouth into a semblance of a smile and thrust out his hand. “It’s great to see you again!” Human males, it seemed, were incapable of ignoring the invitation of an extended hand.

      The bearded one’s mouth smiled in a poor attempt to hide his lack of recognition. The moment their hands clasped, Kaderil pushed thoughts into the human’s head. His name is Kade and I know him. I trust him.

      “Kade!” the bearded man exclaimed, the cloud of confusion lifting from his eyes. “What brings you here?”

      “Which boat is Larsen Vale’s?”

      The man motioned Kaderil to the window and pointed to the boat in the last slip. “That’s hers down there. That’s not Larsen on the boat, though. Looks as if she has company.” A lone person walked across the deck, a tall woman with hair like flame. A woman who was not, apparently, his quarry. But she was on a Sitheen’s boat. As good a place to start as any.

      His pulse leaped with possibility. Even if she wasn’t Larsen Vale, she might know her, or be a Sitheen herself. Already, the day was looking up.

      Kaderil turned and left the marina office. Behind him he heard a distant, “Good to see you again, Kade. Always a pleasure.” Belatedly, he remembered he should have said thank-you or goodbye.

      But his patience for the trivial was thin. He had a draggon stone to track down and Sitheen to destroy. And two short weeks to accomplish both.

      Long enough, perhaps, for he had an advantage they would never suspect. He looked like them. They wouldn’t know he was Esri.

      Until too late.

      A siren sounded in the distance, rising over the clank and splash of the tie lines, making Autumn’s stomach hurt. Every time she turned on the news, another bizarre death was being reported in D.C. Every time she heard a siren, she wondered how many more people had died because of the Esri. How many more murders she might have prevented if she hadn’t let that kid go.

      A chilly breeze blew a loose wisp of hair in her face as she made her way across the swaying deck of the houseboat to the makeshift desk she’d set up near the back rail. The setting sun over the water blinded her with its brilliance. She grabbed her chair, as much to secure her balance as to move it to the other side of the small table that held her laptop.

      Larsen had offered up her unoccupied boat when Autumn had needed a place to stay for a few weeks while her apartment was being repaired after a pipe burst in the unit above hers. In hindsight, she wished she’d taken her less-than-stellar coordination into consideration when she’d decided to live in a moving house. The boat was one of dozens moored at the Top Sail Marina on the Potomac River. Across the river rose the office towers of the very urban Virginia suburbs.

      Autumn plopped down in front of her laptop as a pair of gulls cried overhead. For two weeks she’d been trying to find a clue to the other Esri stones. She might not be much of a soldier, but she was a crack researcher, and finding the stones was her only chance to make up for letting that Esri kid go.

      Her current research path followed the acquisition records for the Stone of Ezrie: the stone whose scent Baleris had apparently followed to find the gate between the worlds, the stone the Esri called the draggon stone, according to Tarrys. Tarrys was the second of Baleris’s slaves, a pretty little thing, barely five feet tall, who had actually helped them defeat Baleris, then stayed after his death.

      Before Baleris’s arrival, the draggon stone had been doing time as a Smithsonian artifact. A thumb-size pale blue teardrop on a silver chain, the thing had appeared innocuous enough. What made it unique was the seven-pointed star etched on its surface and the legend that it was the key to the gates of Ezrie—a legend, it turned out, that was all too true. If the Esri got their hands on that stone and took it back through the gate, the seals on all twelve gates around the world would instantly dissolve. The Esri could still only get through during the midnight hour of a full moon, but the thought of Baleris’s reign of terror times twelve…every month…was enough to give ulcers to the bravest of souls.

      She shivered and reached for the zipper on her jacket. If the draggon stone was a key, what was the purpose of the other Esri stones the kid had mentioned? Were they all keys? Or did they serve a different, more ominous purpose? All she knew was they’d better find them before the Esri did.

      Her

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