“You ready?”Adam asked her.
Worries whirled through her mind like frightened birds.Ellie drew in a breath of air scented with both flowers and the electricity of a coming storm.
She lifted her chin with determination.“Yes.”
“Then let’s go,” Adam concluded, taking her hand.
?
Twenty
Adam stalked acrossthe ruddy hills northwest of Ranyapali, his thoughts locked worriedly on the skinny twelve-year-old girl he needed to rescue.
He liked Vanika.He had liked her from the moment she had bounded down the steps of the palace to greet them when they arrived in Nandapur.He liked that she read cowboy books, traded insults with princes, and eyed his machete like she wanted to try it on for size.She was a great kid, and Adam had let her walk into the worst kind of trouble while he sat around drinking flower booze with her grandma.
He knew that Vanika had put herself in that dangerous position—hell, she’d been ordered by a damned maharaja not to go any further than the village—but she was a kid.It should have been Adam’s job to make sure she actually listened, and he had screwed that up.
He hadn’t been lying about the advantage he and Ellie had when it came to dealing with Jacobs—but the truth was, Adam would’ve gone after Vanika regardless.
As Adam followed the route Subhas had given him, red earth and scrub gave way to stands of tall, graceful trees clustered around streams that carried the waters of the monsoon into the valley.Here and there, gaps between the hills revealed glimpses of the deeper forest, thickly green and dancing with shadows.
Ellie hiked at Adam’s heels.Kalb trotted ahead of them, frequently glancing back as though urging them to move faster.Adam could almost imagine that the dog had some idea of who they were trying to find and wanted to help.Maybe he even could.Adam hadn’t had much time to try training Kalb, but he was a hunting breed, and hunting breeds usually had great noses.Certainly, he’d proved himself more than capable of finding things like hidden cats or an abandoned plate of cookies.
“But why didn’t he tell us?”Ellie burst out behind him.
Adam cocked an eyebrow at her in an unspoken reminder that whatever conversation she had been having in her head, she was only just now letting him in on it.
“Neil,” Ellie grumblingly elaborated.
“Your brother was never going to be comfortable with having magical past-seeing abilities,” Adam pointed out.
He had been thinking about Neil’s revelation as well.After the initial shock, Adam had found himself less surprised than he might have been about the whole business.In a mad sort of way, it fit.It had always been a bit uncanny how Neil knew stuff about the past.He couldn’t always say where he’d picked up a particular piece of information.He’d just dismiss it as ‘obvious’ or say that he must have read it in a book.
But some of the stuff Neil came out with had been things even their professors hadn’t known—and they were the guys who wrote the books.
If Neil had some kind of supernatural gift for sensing what was true about history, it would certainly explain a few things.Adam could hardly dismiss the notion out of hand.He’d seen far too much weird stuff over the last few months for that.
“I know he wouldn’t be comfortable with it.”Words spilled out of Ellie now as she hiked in Adam’s wake.“But he still might have toldme.”
“Have you told him you’re carrying Tulan around in your head?”
“No,” Ellie admitted tightly, and then rushed to explain.“It isn’t that I don’t trust him.I just hardly understand what’s happening myself.How can I strike up a conversation—one where he’s sure to have a hundred questions—about a subject that’s still an infuriating mystery to me?”
“You and your brother have a lot in common,” Adam commented softly and significantly.
Ellie let out a frustrated sigh.“You’re right.It’s wrong of me to take it personally.But… we might’vehelpedeach other.”
“You still can.Youwill, once we get through all this.”
“But that’s three of us now who can do things that ought to be impossible.Does that mean the whole world is full of… of…” Ellie pressed a hand to her temple.“I don’t even know what word to use for it!I don’t know if thereisa word.”
Adam frowned thoughtfully.“Someone’s gotta know.”
Ellie’s focus sharpened.“What do you mean?”
“All this stuff isn’t coming out of nowhere.These magic trinkets we’ve been stumbling across are all talked about in the old myths and stories.It just turns out they weren’t as made up as we thought they were.”
He took a step closer to her, reading the frustration, worry, and hope roiling behind her hazel eyes.“Those old stories were full of people who could do crazy stuff as well.Maybe that part wasn’t all made up, either.And if that’s true—if this has been going on the whole time—you can’t be the first person to have figured that out.”
