Updrift (31 page)

And, for a while, this seemed to be the formula for success, letting her pass her days in the garden or cooking, which, he had to admit, she was good at. He, meanwhile, was free to attend to his work, which was suffering from his inattention. Even during the slowest times, he was used to putting in ten-hour days, and his time spent trailing and then keeping Kate amused had put him precariously behind.

“What do you do all day while I’m out living solely for my own entertainment?” she inquired one night. You’re gone for hours at a time now, and you come back spent. I have to say, I’m a little jealous.” He felt her shame after she told him this, how she also felt freer, less oppressed without him hovering over her all the time. “I don’t mean to be petty,” she apologized. “You probably need the work, the diversion from being holed up, as much as I do.”

He gave her an answer as close to the truth as he could manage. “Peter and Kenna have put me to work in their office,” he revealed. Then he told her dryly, “You wouldn’t believe how demanding it is to run a government.”

Kate was surprised. “I would have thought you’d try to work at the local clinic, or a medical facility of some sort.”

“Oh. Well, yes,” he stammered to buy a few seconds of time. “See, there isn’t much in terms of a viable medical facility here, and the Loughlins
need
help. So I’ve offered to dig in where I can. I’m getting quite the legal education.”

She hugged him tightly. “I’m so sorry, Gabe. You’re having to put your medical career on hold, after how hard you worked to make it happen. I’ve been so selfish. I haven’t even thought of all you’re giving up to be here.”

“My darling.” Peter stroked her hair, touched by her attempt to comfort him. “Don’t worry. I’ve been thinking medicine might not be for me after all.”

*

Kate froze. Gabe had never even hinted at an alternative career, and to hear him dismiss his former passion so casually shocked her. In fact, she felt something close to devastation.

“I mean, if this is what we have to do for the rest of our lives, I’m happy to do it,” he quickly added. His expression became tender. “As long as we’re together.”

She felt her expression crumble and tried to hide her distress with a smile, which she saw he did not understand. But his mention of doing this
for the rest of our lives
hit her like an anvil to the stomach, the implications of this possibility too painful for her to consider. The life they’d so recently envisioned, her parents, their friends…all of it disappeared. She grasped at the first thought running through her head to quell the onrush of despair enveloping her.

“Help me feel the baby again,” she begged, forcing back tears. Gabe, for once, did not cajole or cross examine her. He did help her feel better, however, spanning her stomach with his hand. As he concentrated on the life within her and brought it prominently to her own perceptions, she relaxed and eventually smiled. Hope and calm flowed through her.

“We’re both tired, darling,” he soothed. “Let’s go back.”

* * * *

Peter held her until she dreamed and then carefully climbed out of bed. He was so drained, he was afraid he’d sleep through if she woke in the night, which she’d started to do. He couldn’t afford to risk appearing as Peter to her. He went to his office to crash on the couch, giving himself over, for the first time in months, to the sweet oblivion of deep slumber.

He sneaked back early the next morning, moving lightly and invisibly through the corridors toward his chambers. He stopped before entering to let the projection of Gabe flood through him, his cloaking efforts in this regard second nature to him now.

He sat in a chair by the window, watched her while she slept, and assessed their situation. Rested for once, he was able to take fresh stock of his progress, buoyed again by the success he’d had so far. He acknowledged his story had become, by necessity, dangerously convoluted, and he worried over all the ways his growing number of deceits could sabotage him should the details of his life escape beyond Kate.

He needed to draw her more transparently into the fold of his public life, to further his vision of bonding with her, but also to explain her ongoing presence in the palace. He thought as the sun came up, until a solution came to him. A slow, self-congratulatory smile spread across his face as he went through possible pitfalls and what-ifs.

It could work. In fact, if he acted wisely, Kate could be legally, physically and emotionally his within the month. He rose to set his plans in motion, leaving Kate a note he would be gone most of the day. Gabe’s messy, nearly unreadable writing was distasteful compared to his own beautiful script, but he was glad this part of his act, at least, was easy to fake. He sauntered to his offices with a confidence he hadn’t felt in weeks.

* * * *

Gabe was used to studying but he put his concentration to the test with the rigorous effort he made to practice cloaking. He didn’t yet understand how Peter could have staged Kate’s death as he had, and so convincingly. He knew the man must be a far better cloaker than anyone in the community knew, and he continued his review of Kate’s disappearance in his search for clues as to how he’d done it.

Cloaking, he was surprised, did come naturally to him, and he wondered why he hadn’t seen evidence of this talent earlier in life. Granted, the impetus he felt from his overwhelming grief put him in a unique frame of mind; but he’d experienced high levels of stress before, and, to his knowledge, had never once disappeared.

He played with his skill now in an effort to expand and control it, drifting between conscious awareness of his surroundings, and the state of semi-conscious withdrawal he came to know as his place of hiding. As he drilled, he grew to respect the truly awesome ability Peter must have to execute the cloak he’d tried—succeeded in creating—with him and his family.

For the next few days, he mulled over every occurrence from the evening before Kate’s disappearance, and then reviewed the events from the morning of the pseudo shark attack. He thought and meditated on these variables as he materialized and withdrew, sitting on his couch or floor, forming theories as his mind ebbed and flowed through this sea of wild possibilities and artful subterfuge. He focused all of him, the whole of his life’s experience and interests, within these two planes of existence: one, where he focused on Kate; and another, where he concentrated on learning to cloak.

* * * *

Xanthe’s unexpected visit threw Peter’s plans for the day out the window. He acted as though nothing could have delighted him more, of course, and he quietly cleared his calendar to accommodate her. His more urgent aim was to hide all evidence of Kate’s presence and appear as though nothing had changed since the last time they’d met. He didn’t think Kate and Xanthe had ever been introduced, but he knew Xanthe and Carmen were friends and he felt—unnecessarily, he hoped—the need for caution.

He discreetly penned a note to Kate, telling her Peter and Kenna had an important assignment for him.

I’ll be kept late tonight, so don’t wait up. We also have visitors at the palace today, darling, so you’ll need to keep to the suite today. Love.

He knew having to stay in would depress her, so he also arranged for a huge bouquet of flowers to be delivered as well.

*

Xanthe had fabricated a plausible excuse for dropping by—she owed the Loughlins information from a summit—but her primary purpose was to investigate Gabe’s suspicions regarding Peter. She hoped they were baseless, because if they weren’t, the whole community would suffer the consequences. She would have to consider very seriously what kind of conflict would ensue if Gabe’s hypotheses proved accurate.

But she believed the truth would eventually come out, and maintained it was always better to address difficult situations directly and as soon as possible. She notified the staff she’d need a spare office for a half hour or so, and was directed to one across the hall from where she’d met with Peter. On her way, she passed someone carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers, and, without meaning to, heard the delivery man’s thoughts: they were for Peter’s girlfriend, Elizabeth.

Peter hadn’t mentioned anyone was staying with him, which wasn’t significant. But he was hiding this information—she’d used her intuition to query him specifically about a female guest and was stonewalled, which
was
significant. She’d also sensed nothing from him as he’d been ordering flowers, and she’d monitored him closely since her arrival. After a brief hesitation, she followed the courier with the bouquet.

Gabe’s cloaking demonstration had been instructive, and while she herself did not have the facility, she did understand how she might, with great effort, edit her emotional broadcast. She tried to edit it now, and also kept her distance in an attempt to dilute her presence, which she could not do very well. But she did appear benign and unthreatening, and, consequently, no one paid her any particular attention as she watched the unfolding of events at the door of Peter’s personal suite. Others’ distractions, thankfully, also gave her cover.

After a knock on the door to what she knew to be Peter’s private rooms, a woman she’d never seen before opened it. From Gabe’s memory of her, she knew Kate had lighter hair, but this woman was definitely human and about the same age Kate would be.

And she was pregnant.

The door was open long enough for Xanthe to catch three more vital pieces of information: the woman named Elizabeth understood she was in hiding, and she was homesick for her human family in Childress. Most damning of all, she believed someone named Gabe had sent her those flowers.

She hurried back to the administrative area, her heart racing with the implications of what she’d just seen. She stopped a page outside of the Loughlins’ main offices and relayed her apologies to Kenna and Peter but she had an emergency to attend to and had to leave immediately. She hoped the assistant, highly intuitive—because that was the only kind of staff the Loughlins employed—would attribute her agitation to the emergency she cited, a credible, even probable possibility. As the assistant left, Xanthe added another message as an afterthought. “Please tell Peter I’ve met someone for one of his guard positions. Very talented young man named Charles Gavin. I’ll send him by.”

She fled the palace, desperate to escape the scrutiny she would draw if she ran into anyone paying any real attention to her. She had no talent for lying, and no idea how someone who’d behaved as recklessly as Peter Loughlin had would react if her thoughts were discovered. No one stopped her, and she raced back to the mainland to see Gabe.

Anxious to relay her findings, she left the water leading to Gabe’s distracted and agitated, unwittingly retaining more of her siren self than she should have on land. She realized too late what she’d done, or more aptly, what she hadn’t. She’d done nothing to mask faint iridescence in her skin and hair. Her eyes probably had a thin film of mercury over them, and she was sure her affect was wild. She felt wild.

A true siren, she began to collect people during her brief stroll from the shore to Gabe’s apartment, her strange beauty and need for emotional equilibrium compulsively broadcasting and attracting. She couldn’t help it. Children drifted toward her first, followed by their mothers. A few otherwise respectable men on their way to work also became caught in her song, and trailed after her with the frantic pleas of lovesick suitors.

Within minutes she was trapped in the center of approximately twenty hypnotized, adoring fans, unable to advance another step. “Beautiful lady…my sister…my lover,” she heard them whisper. She regretted the spectacle she’d caused even as she luxuriated in the swell of devotion surrounding her. She projected a silent plea toward Gabe, who was already drifting out onto his porch, pulled by the concentration of human emotion he felt outside his home. He comprehended Xanthe’s predicament after one, sweeping glance, and seemed delighted with her debacle.

He cloaked to break into the crowd, which also protected him from getting drawn into the frenzy of human feeling surrounding her, she saw. He was jovial when he put his arm across her shoulders. “C’mon, Aunt Charlotte. Time for your cholesterol pill.”

Xanthe guffawed. The absurdity of his words distracted the crowd just enough for she and Gabe to extricate themselves. They brushed against each person as they left, silently working to edit memories and feelings so they would forget her.

Once in the house, she laughed hysterically with him, which relieved her excess energy and stress. When they were calm enough to talk, they clasped arms so Xanthe could share her experience at the palace.

Gabe’s expression progressed from despair to wild hope, to grim triumph, and by the end of her story, she watched as the knowledge Kate was alive flooded the desolate space in his heart with relief. He choked with emotion. He silently vowed to hunt down and kill Peter Loughlin for taking Kate away from him.

Xanthe registered this response with a sharp intake of breath and put her hand on Gabe’s chest to stop him. He was justified, she knew, but these kinds of angry impulses were antithetical to their militantly civilized siren nature; and she was not comfortable with Gabe’s quick assumption violence was the best course. She also wanted time to consider the least destructive option for resolving this situation in light of her community’s stability.

Gabe shrugged her off with an angry, impatient gesture. “What Peter has done is not civilized. In fact, it’s a grotesque violation, not just of our ethics, but of our—please forgive the term—humanity.”

“I cannot give you permission to go after Kate with the intent of killing our prince,” she told him harshly. “We need to address this through the right channels, Gabe.”

Gabe would not say he would not attack Peter but he did promise to refrain from acting on his vengeance until they knew more.

“I need you to verify the woman he’s keeping named Elizabeth is, in fact, your Kate. It’s fortunate you can cloak, because you’ll have to if you want to get within two hundred yards of the palace.