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After rushing to get ready and missing breakfast, she and Levka and his friends arrived at Martinique’s Balata Botanical Gardens, nestled at the foot of towering mountains. Razor-backed ridges surrounded the volcanic mountain, Mt. Pelee, shrouded in dense clouds.
“Stick close to me, like before,” Levka warned her at Les Ombrages, the path leading through a mini-rain forest.
“Hmpf. After Stasio and Arman bit Vlad I can’t imagine he’d try to bother us in the gardens today,” she teased.
Levka frowned at her. She smiled.
“I’m serious.” He tightened his hand around hers.
Caitlin breathed in the sweet floral fragrance from the thousands of varieties of flowers and tugged him down another path, until she noticed Arman watching them from an intersecting walkway.
“Besides, this time even Ruric is with us,” she said to Levka.
“Yes, he was disappointed he didn’t get to see my mermaid swimming in the pool at Concord Falls yesterday.”
“Hmm, well, there are lots of ornamental lakes here, if the park caretakers didn’t mind me swimming.” Slowing her pace, she observed the blood red hibiscus, purple begonias, and orchids in a rainbow of colors. She looked up at Levka. “I wish I could swim in the ocean’s aqua surf, just once before we return home.”
“We still have St. Martin tomorrow, if you want to go to the beach.”
“Maybe…” She pulled him along. “Maybe we could go to one for a little while. I could try and wade out a little ways.”
“We can certainly give it a try.”
Caitlin caught a glimpse of someone watching them near the Creole mansion in the center of the gardens. She swore it looked like the tracker, Petroski, but then he faded away down another path.
“Would the tracker still be keeping an eye on you and your friends?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“I thought I just saw him over there.” Caitlin pointed in the direction he had taken.
“No. He told us he would be returning to Dallas. He knows where we are and would have no reason to monitor our movements after we said we’d return and do the league’s bidding.”
Maybe so, but she swore it was Petroski, and he was watching them. “Will you tell your friends?”
Levka smiled at her.
“Well? Even if you don’t believe he’s here, I bet you’ve told the others to keep an eye out for him.”
“You’re right. I’ve told them what you think you’ve seen, and they’re keeping a lookout for him as well as for Vlad, though they feel as I do, that Petroski is not here.”
“You are absolutely sure?” She raised her brows with the question.
He wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “No. That’s why I told the others to watch for him.”
“If he’s here, then what?”
He didn’t answer.
“Levka?”
He directed her down another path. “Seems Stasio and Arman’s biting Vlad was not enough.”
“You’re kidding. He’s here?”
“In the flesh.”
Suddenly, Vlad converged on their path, but tourists strolled down virtually every walkway, and she didn’t believe he would create a scene here. She stared at his neck. The bandages were gone, and there wasn’t a mark of any kind on the skin.
