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Yes, she understood what Adrien was feeling extremely well because on the coattails was that elusive thing called hope. Maybe now, after accomplishing so much together, they could succeed at what needed doing, at finding the weapon and rescuing Josh because of it, so that Lily could at last bring him home.
As she drew back, she wondered if she should tell Adrien about her son. Hadn’t he earned the right to know the truth despite Kiernan’s warning to keep it a secret? Didn’t her hard-won relationship with Adrien demand the truth?
She wanted to tell him. Desperately.
She planted a hand on his chest.
“What is it?” His brow furrowed, a familiar look for him.
She made the decision and the dam within her broke. “Adrien, my son isn’t dead. He’s alive. Kiernan has him. He’s had him for two years, since the attack on my neighborhood. He’s kept him all this time, without my knowledge, when I thought Josh was dead, so that when Daniel wanted to use him to get to me, to create this”—she touched the chain at her neck—“he’d have the tool he needed, the only thing that would have ever persuaded me down this road with you.”
Adrien blinked a couple of times. His head jerked as he processed what she’d just told him. His lips parted; he might even have murmured something. He finally said, “I imagined so many things, this secret that you’d kept from me, but not this. Oh, dear God.” He stepped sideways, releasing her. He seemed to have trouble breathing. He pressed a fist to his forehead.
She needed to tell him everything. “I’ve been through hell since I learned he was alive. And I can’t imagine what my son has gone through. I contacted him earlier, before Rome. I made telepathic contact. He’s alive. I truly didn’t know for sure until just then that he really is alive. I mean Kiernan let me talk to him once, but these men have such resources at their command I thought maybe he’d faked the whole thing. But I spoke to Josh this evening. He has a caregiver, a woman named Claire. A human.”
She seemed to run out of words and speaking them aloud somehow made it worse, the truth of what she’d been through, what her son had suffered. A strange strangled sound came out of her throat. But Adrien caught her and drew her into his arms. Her eyes burned but she couldn’t cry. The horror of her son’s situation and of her own held her in mute paralysis.
But Adrien’s arms soothed her and helped dissipate all that rising horror and emotion. “It’s okay, it’s okay. It’ll be all right. We’ll get him, we’ll find him. Somehow we’ll bring your son home.”
“How?”
And then the real question surfaced, the one she’d been ignoring from almost the beginning, pretending she didn’t care because she hated all vampires: how could she and Adrien ever turn over the extinction weapon to Daniel? How could she ever trade Josh’s life, though precious beyond words, for a weapon that would be given to a monster who wouldn’t think twice about obliterating entire cavern systems of vampires on a whim if it suited him?
He pulled back from her but he took hold of her arms, staring hard at her. “Lily, listen to me. We’ll take this, as we have from the start, one step at a time. Now that I know what’s really going on here, what has motivated every step of your journey, it changes the game.”
“There’s no way out.” Her words came out hushed.
“There’s always a way out. We just can’t see it yet, and right now we have a gala to get to. Maybe something will surface in Beijing that we can use. Have you tried tracking the weapon by focusing on China?”
She shook her head. “My thoughts have all been about Josh.”
“Of course they have.” He shook his head. “Your son is alive. How old is he?”
“Ten. He was eight when he was taken. Two years ago. Oh, God.”
He nodded several times in a row. “All right. Beijing. We need to go there now, get things rolling again.”
Lily forced herself to breathe once more and turned her tracking ability to China. She thought of nothing else but the weapon and Beijing. Adrien rubbed her arms slowly and she closed her eyes. His power flowed through her, the tremendous power she siphoned from him continuously.
The pull began like a gentle tug on her body to a place she could only define as very dark, but quickly became a grip of need: She had to get to China. Adrien, what is the name of the Beijing resort?
The Black Cavern.
I have a fix on it, and the pull of the weapon is strong, really strong. Her tracking ability roared to life as it never had before, she felt the location rushing toward her.
Good.
She drew in a sharp breath as another sensation arrived. The weapon is there. I can feel it. The weapon is in Beijing. But this was followed by another pull as she cried out. “Oh, my God, Josh is there as well. I can feel him. Josh is at the Black Caverns.”
“Has he been there all along?”
Lily shook her head. “No. When I used telepathy earlier, it just didn’t feel as far as China. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, it does. Well then, we’d better go.”
She nodded. He pulled her tight against him and the flight began. The entire distance, Lily’s heart ached as she thought about her son, yet she feared that the whole situation couldn’t possibly lead to a happy outcome.
She wondered, too, why Kiernan would have brought Josh to Beijing—or maybe it was Daniel’s doing. Did he know something that she didn’t, about the Black Caverns and the extinction weapon? Did he know, for instance, that both she and Adrien, as a bonded tracking team would be there, at this particular gala?
A dark sensation moved through her as Adrien brought her closer to Beijing. Daniel would want to hurt them both because of what had happened in Mexico. She felt naive suddenly, that her previous and very brief spurt of confidence hadn’t taken into account that once Daniel had tested Adrien in Mexico, he’d now turn up the heat. And what better way to remind her of the pact she had with Kiernan than to bring Josh to the Black Caverns.
But she strove to calm herself as Adrien flew them east. She needed her wits about her, to hold Daniel at bay, if possible, while she sought the weapon, maybe even to get to Josh and take him away before Daniel could stop her.
The flight lasted less than a minute, a huge change from her first night with Adrien.
He took them to the far edge of what turned out to be a landing field for those just now flying in.
Adrien chose a spot and brought them down gently, using the experience of four centuries to avoid other couples.
