Crystal Fire Read online

  For days Gabe had been running drills that tested the hive connection they shared. Lucas got pushed harder than the other dozen Indigo children who were staying at the estate. Gabriel and Kendra believed he was on the path to becoming a Crystal child like Gabe. That was another evolutionary step beyond the more warriorlike Indigo children. A Crystal child was a peaceful protector as well as an incredibly strong psychic. Lucas was pure Crystal child, unlike Gabe, who had developed his hybrid abilities first as an Indigo before he transcended into becoming a Crystal child, encompassing the best and most powerful of both worlds.

  As it turned out, Lucas had a lot in common with his counterpart, but their psychic muscle and aptitude for the bizarre were the only things they shared. Linking to the Indigo warrior rage in Gabriel—the violence he was capable of—made the drills pure agony for him.

  On his knees, Lucas doused his face with bottled water. Sweat poured off him, and his whole body felt weak as if he’d run a marathon without a day of training. Being held in a mental hospital for years had made him soft.

  “What happened? You broke it off before you got to the shotgun part. You had it, Luke. You were almost there.” Gabriel barged into his training room where he’d been isolated on purpose.

  “No, you were doing it, not me. This is insane. I can’t do it.” Lucas got off the floor and wiped his face with the towel he had draped over his neck. Mental sparring with Gabriel had turned into a fierce workout that went beyond the physical. Gabe would expect him to sacrifice his beliefs. It was bound to happen, but he wasn’t sure he could do that.

  “This isn’t just an exercise to build up my abilities, is it? I know where this is heading...what you expect me to do, but I’m not made of ice like you, Gabe.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The silence between them became deafening. Lucas gulped water to give him time to figure out what to say. When the Effin twins came into the room, along with a few others, Lucas should have stopped for Gabriel’s sake, but he didn’t.

  “Harnessing this kind of power is meant...to destroy. I don’t think I can kill another human being to save my own life.” He blurted out the words, not caring how they sounded. “That would make me no better than them.”

  No one said anything.

  The glare that Gabe had on his face softened, but it didn’t go away. He took a deep breath and heaved a weighty sigh that reverberated off the acoustics of the training room.

  “Damn it, Luke. You think this is easy for me?” Gabe’s voice was low and barely above a whisper. “Contrary to what you might believe about me, I’ve never killed anyone, but you don’t know what we’ll be up against. You’ve only seen a fraction of what they can do. They’ll learn from their mistakes. They already killed Benny, but things will get worse.”

  Luke crossed his arms. He felt like crap, especially after he saw the disappointed look in Gabe’s eyes. He respected the guy. He just didn’t have to agree with him.

  “Look, the church will see most of these kids as expendable, but I can’t tell them that,” Gabe said, only loud enough for him to hear. “I understand your view and it’s brave and commendable, but this isn’t a theoretical discussion about violence and how men should live. The reality is that we’ve got to step up. We’re the only ones who can protect them against men who don’t have your scruples.”

  Lucas hadn’t thought about how vulnerable the others were. It was one thing to put his own life on the line and accept the consequences, but could he sit back and watch the Believers launch another attack like the one that killed ten-year-old Benny? The homeless kid had just wanted to belong to some kind of family—and Kendra and her group had taken him in. Until the Believers flushed them out of their tunnels like rats, killing Benny without provocation. For Lucas, the act of killing another human being—no matter how justified the reason—would tear down the foundation of his humanity. But so would sitting on the sidelines and watching others around him dying without doing a thing. Doubts waged war in his head.

  Gabe turned to walk away before he lost his temper, but when he stopped and turned back, Luke braced for more.

  “What would you die for, Lucas? Would you kill to protect your sister?”

  Lucas felt the heat rush to his face.

  “I shouldn’t have to,” he said.

  “Yeah, exactly.” Gabe dialed back the attitude. “In a perfect world, human beings don’t kill their own kind and they don’t hunt kids in secret. Pull your head out and open your eyes, Luke. Perfect doesn’t exist.”

  Gabe stormed from the room and never looked back. As he left, he said, “Training’s over for today.”

  Lucas felt like shit.

  Midnight

  Gabriel Stewart had awakened from a restless sleep, drenched in sweat with his sketchbook in his lap as he sat on the floor next to his bed. He flipped on the lights to see the face of another kid in trouble staring back, and his drawing triggered flashes of his nightmare vision. Gabe knew sleep would be impossible, after the intensity of the dream. He had to get out and breathe fresh air. After he splashed water on his face, he got dressed in jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt and took the sketchbook with him.

  He’d drawn more faces over the past week. His connection to those kids had come through Lucas. He felt it. In the quiet of the mansion at this hour, Gabe was alone with his dark thoughts as he crept up the winding stairs of the highest tower that overlooked the estate grounds, one of his favorite places to think. When he got to the rooftop of the mansion, he leaned against a parapet to look out over the valley. The night sky flickered with countless stars, and a sliver of the moon dappled its sparing light over the rolling foothills. A cool breeze tousled his hair as he faced into the wind. As a child, he’d felt as if he stood on the top of the world here, but now the weight of that world felt crushing.

  Being alone with his thoughts, he felt the magnitude of what he was doing. He’d spent weeks training kids to use their psychic gifts to fight—to defend themselves against people who could kill them. At first he made it an amusement for the little ones, to give their minds a chance to process what he eventually wanted them to do. He didn’t know how to explain human cruelty to kids, especially when they were the target. The dark way his mind worked now, to anticipate what the Believers could do to them, wasn’t something he ever wanted to share with anyone. That reflected more on his disturbing nature.

  The death of his mother, at the hand of his father, had changed everything. His childhood ended the day she died. With everything she gave him, she’d prepared him as best she could and opened a door to his future. But thanks to his father, he’d have to live that future without her.

  The beauty of the Bristol Mountains at night wasn’t enough to distract him from thoughts of his father, the stress of the training or his argument with Lucas. It was bad enough that he had to look into the young faces of the Effin twins and ask the brothers to concentrate on the hypothalamus gland of the human brain and give control over to him. He didn’t want the boys to know how deadly he could adapt their gift. That gland controlled the four Fs—the instincts to fight, flee, feed and fuck. Only one would be an excellent way to die.

  But if it came to it, he’d be the one to kill, not the twins. He had to insulate them from the violence somehow and he hoped Rayne’s brother, Lucas, would feel the same. As a Crystal child, Luke had equal potential for channeling and amassing the Indigo powers of the collective, but in training today he deliberately shut Gabe down. He refused to use his abilities to test his limits and he didn’t agree with his tactics. The kid was only fifteen and had spent his last few years in a mental hospital. Gabe should have cut him slack, but he couldn’t afford to, not when innocent lives were at risk.

  After they had words, he hadn’t seen Lucas and he hadn’t talked to Rayne since he’d seen her at the firing range. The stress of the long hours of training ha
d taken a toll on them. The gravity of what they were doing—and what they prepared for—had worn them down.

  Rafael Santana had it rough too. He was still dealing with his gunshot wound, but an even deeper injury to his heart had been caused by the death of little Benny, a kid he loved like a brother. Rafe had an inner strength and resolve Gabe could use. He was eighteen and had the respect of the others, but he wasn’t a team player. Gabe wasn’t sure he could count on him.

  Between Rafe and Kendra and Lucas and the twins, Gabe had more people counting on him for safety and a future than ever before. He wasn’t used to caring for others. But he also knew that they wouldn’t be able to hide out here for long.

  Taking the fight to the Believers had to happen. Gabe couldn’t sit back and watch from a distance anymore. Not when he knew that it was his father who was the leader of a legion of religious fanatics bent on destroying their kind. His father’s maniacal mission to eradicate Indigos and Crystal children had been instigated as a reaction to Gabe’s own manifesting powers when he was a boy. From what Lucas had told them, through his nightmarish mental links to the kids being experimented on in Ward 8 of Haven Hills, the church would stop at nothing to destroy what they feared. They didn’t believe that the Indigo kids—the teens with growing mental powers and connections—were the next evolution of mankind. Instead they thought these kids—mostly innocent, mistreated by family and misunderstood by a world not yet ready for them—were an abomination that had to be wiped out, enslaved or turned into nothing more than controllable human lab experiments.

  His father had an agenda, wrapped in dogma, to justify persecution and genocide. In his father’s mind, the ends justified the means. Not a new concept in man’s history, but explain that to the kids who were on the receiving end of such atrocities. His father had to be stopped. Gabe didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know he’d soon have to confront the man—face-to-face—but one question stopped him cold.

  If it came to it, could he kill him?

  The man had taken everything that truly mattered from him, but would revenge for his mother’s death be enough? His mother wouldn’t agree. She’d never want him to use his abilities to kill, but he still had the children to think about. Their lives were in his hands now.

  He’d been so intent on his deadly thoughts that he didn’t hear Rayne walk up behind him. She had to speak to catch his attention.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “I’m getting good at finding your hiding places. I hope you don’t mind company.”

  When he turned, Rayne gave him a shy smile, tinged with the uncertainty that she’d intruded on his privacy. She had on plaid pajama bottoms and a SpongeBob T-shirt and stood wrapped in a blanket draped around her shoulders. Even with all the fancy clothes in the armoire in her room—the offerings for the guests at the estate—she chose SpongeBob, something of her own to wear, and Gabe loved her all the more for it. He opened his mouth to say something, but Rayne shook her head and raised a hand to stop him.

  “You don’t have to explain what you’re doing here...or why you can’t sleep.” She smiled and crossed her arms to brace against the cool night air and tugged the blanket around her. “Is that your new sketchbook?”

  “Yeah. At this rate, I’ll have to buy a new one soon.”

  “Mind if I take a look?” Rayne held out her hand.

  She’d learned to ask permission since the first time she’d seen his visions on paper, the ones he drew without fully being awake. His sketchbook was out of bounds and private. He flipped the artist’s pad open to his latest rendering, the one he wanted her to see. The drawing disturbed him so much he couldn’t say anything.

  “Oh my God. You saw this?” she gasped with her eyes on the dark vision. “No wonder you can’t sleep.”

  She stared at the tortured face of a boy in a helmet, with his mouth gaped open in a silent scream. The kid’s head and eyes were covered and his body was strapped down. The sketch reminded Gabe of the horrors and mutilations of the Inquisition, a disturbing period in history that he’d learned about from his mother when she’d homeschooled him.

  “The guy in the helmet is in real trouble, and things are getting worse. I feel it. These Indigo kids aren’t asking for the world, Rayne. They only want what should be theirs—a home where they can be safe with people who love them, a normal life where they aren’t judged...or hunted for what they can’t help being. I feel responsible for what happens to them now.”

  “I know you do. I can see that. But you saved my brother and these kids once. I know you’ll find a way to help them again. If it makes a difference, I believe in you.”

  Gabe wished that Rayne’s faith in him would be enough to cut through his doubts, but it didn’t. He felt like a poser. Before he could say anything, she pulled him into her arms and kissed him with his sketchbook pressed between them. When he pressed his lips to hers, his fingers ran through her hair as heat rose from his belly and spread. Loving Rayne had been easy. He only wished that one day loving her would be his whole world.

  After Rayne kissed him, she looked at the sketch he’d drawn of the screaming boy and said, “Just hold me.” She burrowed into his arms and nuzzled her warmth to his chest. He kissed her forehead and breathed in the smell of lavender soap and something uniquely Rayne. The minute he held her in his arms, Gabe knew that he’d kill to protect her—even if his father stood in his way.

  With that thought, a familiar anger stirred in his belly and burned like a seething, hot ember, braced by the never-ending love he had for his mother. For him, all the wrongs of the Believers had a face, the man calling the shots in Los Angeles. He closed his eyes and fixed on his father.

  Alexander Reese.

  Los Angeles, California

  Hours later

  Gabriel had finally come to face the past he could no longer outrun.

  The boy felt his way through the darkness as easily as if it were daylight. Inside the formidable walls that surrounded the secluded estate, Gabriel kept watch of the men who patrolled the grounds. Dressed in black uniforms and armed, guards patrolled the posh residence in pairs, but Gabriel sensed every turn they made and anticipated their moves even before they made them. In evasive and fluid maneuvers that looked more like perfectly timed choreography, he ducked behind shrubs and crept through the deep shadows cast by the trees—pushing too hard, risking too much. It was as if he dared these armed men to catch him.

  The moon shed little light, but the boy navigated the dark using his powerful gifts of second sight. A reckless kid playing a dangerous game. The darkness would be a handicap only for the men who protected the estate—defending the man he’d come to confront.

  Gabriel melded into the shadows and vanished as he got close to the house. He dissolved like mist that drifted in the night. But when a floorboard creaked on the grand staircase, his heart pounded in his chest. He couldn’t stop his body from reacting. Gabriel crept toward the master suite. When the bedroom door opened with only a whisper of warning, everything had come to that moment. A boy would face his father. For the first time in years.

  He wanted to move but couldn’t. He stopped breathing. His lungs burned as if they were on fire. The years of Gabriel running, hating and grieving had gathered force to drive him here. The boy stood over the bed and glared at the man who had ruined his life and destroyed his mother.

  A commanding power stirred in Gabriel. It seethed like a festering heat and he shook with its magnitude. When he couldn’t contain it anymore, shafts of searing light burst from his mouth and eyes and hurled energy into a rising force. Gabriel fixed his preternatural eyes on the one he’d come to finally confront, and the man winced in terror at his son and cried out.

  Alexander Reese finally understood what his boy had become.

  * * *

  “No!” He jolted off his pillow.

  Alexander Reese sucked air into his l
ungs like a drowning man and stared into the darkness of his bedroom. With his body drenched in sweat, he searched the room looking for anything that moved. At first his eyes played tricks on him. Shadows stirred his worst imaginings and even noises that should have been familiar made him strain to listen harder. He had to blink to make sure he was awake.

  “Gabriel,” he whispered. A tear trickled down his cheek.

  That nightmare felt as real as if it had happened. A part of him wanted his runaway son to be there for purely selfish reasons. Except for a blurry surveillance photo, he hadn’t seen his eighteen-year-old boy since his mother had taken him with her in the middle of the night too many years ago. Beyond wanting to see the young man he’d become, Reese never wanted to lay eyes on the boy again—for Gabriel’s sake.

  Even though he still felt the enduring presence of his son in his memory, he sensed that he was alone. Only his shame lingered, over what had happened to Gabriel—and what fate would have in store for the boy. His mother, Kathryn, had been to blame for how his child’s life had turned out. Her deceit had pitted father against son. A twist in Reese’s gut always came when he thought of Kathryn. She’d destroyed his happiness and tested his faith in his church.

  Yet something more disturbed him than a past he’d been ashamed of.

  Given the security at his estate, Reese knew breaching the defense measures of his home and grounds would be hard for anyone to crack. He found it odd that in his hellish nightmare he believed that Gabriel had done it.

  “Damn.”

  With a shudder, he sank back onto his damp sheets and stared at the ceiling with the sound of his breathing and the thud of his heart filling his head. Ever since he’d found out that Gabriel had come back to L.A., nightmares were his constant companion.

  In truth, he dreaded seeing his son again. Not merely for what the boy had become, but Reese didn’t want to face what he’d be forced to do to his son in the name of his faith and his duty. How far would he go to sacrifice what he fervently believed, that these children were a new plague, a mutation that could destroy mankind? His faith demanded that man be held to a different standard—a far superior ranking—than any other living thing. As believers in God and made in the Creator’s image, man had a duty to survive and defend his right to life against anyone who would threaten his future—even if that menace came from beings masquerading as human. His son’s “condition” did not hold him harmless from blame. Innocence would not be justification for allowing his kind to coexist. They’d be an affront to humanity, especially if they believed they were superior.