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  “No, thank you,” she said politely.

  “You work for me, and I need you to go.”

  “Do you think the drinking could be causing these memory lapses? I already told you: I don’t work for you and I have responsibilities.”

  “I checked on those ‘responsibilities.’” Luic leaned back and his blue eyes gleamed at her. “I think your brother and sister will need the kind of money I’m offering you. I’ll give you two percent of whatever you get back for me. And I’ll pay you another twenty thousand if you can tell me who’s got their fingers all over my money.”

  She froze. Gaby didn’t talk about Carey and Connor or her goal of providing them with a normal life. Ever. What gives this total stranger the right to “check” on us? Her eyes narrowed with what she hoped was anger but felt a lot like fear. What if he’s with Haven? What if they decided that killing Gifts like Mom and Dad wasn’t enough, and they’ve come for me? Or the twins? “Why me? For your kind of money, you can hire teams of accountants.”

  “I could say it’s because, even though Harry recommended you, I had you investigated. You are raising your brother and sister on almost no money. Your parents are dead, and you don’t seem to have any other relatives. And you’re just as smart and talented an accountant as you think you are.”

  “But?”

  “But actually it’s because you don’t like me. You’re not going to try to get on my good side, because neither of us thinks I have one. I’ll have my agent set up your reservations.”

  Afraid, Gaby? Hell, yeah. But his investigations and anything else he found out about the Parkers would have to wait at the end of her nightmare line because there were damn big terrors duking it out for first place. Suppose Haven gets to the twins while I’m away? Should I take Connor and Carey and go to Null City? We would be safe there from Haven’s war on Gifts. We could live there as normal humans, but we’d have to give up our own gifts. Absently she reached out and straightened the decanters, placing the largest in the middle with the two shorter ones on either side. Still, his twenty thousand buys a lot of normal right here in Seattle. And he knows it.

  “Make it five percent of recovery and I’ll do it.” When he nodded, scowling, she pulled out a notebook and flipped through several pages. “I have other things I need to find out from you. And before you tell me to ask someone else, the first thing on my list is who has access to your accounts. I won’t be talking to any of them until I know more about what’s going on.”

  Luic glanced at the pages of her neatly-labeled list. “Did I mention I don’t like you, either?”

  The next morning Gaby was waiting in front of Luic’s hotel for the cab to the airport when she heard her name. She turned and watched Harry Daniels approach. Objectively, she thought, Luic’s best friend and fellow band member might be even better looking. But the severely trimmed beard and long, gold-flecked hair tied back at his neck reminded her of austere saints sculpted by medieval masters.

  “Gabrielle Parker,” he said.

  “Harry Daniels.” She eyed him. “What can I do for you?”

  “We have to talk.” He glanced at her suitcase. “Maybe I can give you a ride to the airport?”

  She laughed. “We never even went out, and the first thing you say to me is ‘We have to talk’? What’s next? ‘We can stay friends?’ Or ‘I’ll never forget the good times?’”

  Harry blinked. “Luic warned me about you, but I didn’t believe him.”

  “I’m not as good with people as I am with numbers.”

  He grinned and waved her toward the convertible idling by the curb. “Now I’m starting to think this could actually work.”

  What did Harry want to work? She looked pointedly at the open convertible. “You know this is Seattle. You’re just inviting trouble.”

  “Rock star.” He shrugged. “Image.”

  “Seattle.” She looked up at the usual overcast. “Rain.”

  He shrugged again and put the top up.

  “So, Harry,” she said as the little car purred along the freeway toward the airport. “How well do you know Luic?”

  “I had a feeling you didn’t accept my ride because you admired my profile.” He sighed. “And I’ve known Luic a lot longer than you can imagine.”

  “Do you know why he’s such a…” she paused. Maybe his best friend wouldn’t appreciate her referring to Luic as crabby or suspicious or carrying a chip on his shoulder the size of the Space Needle. Angry, narcissistic asshole was probably out too.

  “Arrogant son of a bitch?” Harry was grinning.

  Then again, maybe not.

  “I’ve known Luic since we were kids.” Harry looked straight ahead as he guided the car around a slow-moving line of trucks. “His mother’s relatives showed up every now and then full of promises about how she would come back and take care of him soon and how good everything would be. After his first hit song, they were lining up with their hands out. To Luic they were all liars, and soon he was ready to take most things people said to us as lies. So now he doesn’t trust anyone, and he doesn’t give second chances.”

  Harry pulled up in front of the terminal. “Don’t ever lie to him, Gaby.”

  Two weeks later, jet-lagged but glad to be back in Seattle, Gaby stepped into the first phone booth she saw at the airport. When she heard the voice of her neighbor and adopted grandmother, she relaxed for the first time since leaving Seattle. “Hi, Mrs. Allen, it’s Gaby. My plane just landed. Before I talk to Carey and Connor, I wanted to thank you again for staying with them.”

  “Gaby!” cried two voices over Mrs. Allen’s reply. Gaby heard Mrs. Allen laugh as she handed over the phone. She knew from experience Carey would have a death grip on the receiver, but it would be pressed between their two dark heads.

  “Hey you guys. I’m finally done with New York. How are things going?”

  Carey did all the talking for both of them, a jumbled account of school and friends and how she beat up another boy she thought was picking on Connor. Gaby wondered if she would regret the Tai Kwon Do classes they had all been taking in hopes of boosting Connor’s confidence.

  “Carey, we’ve talked about this,” Gaby interrupted. “You know what happens when you fight for Connor.”

  “Hot fudge sundaes,” Carey said happily. “And I get to pick the toppings.”

  “Connor?” Gaby prodded.

  “I was fine. Miss Ready-Fire-Aim went off the deep end as usual.” He moved in for the kill.

  “So I think I should get to pick the toppings.” Carey’s wail of protest sounded through the phone.

  “Well, this is still a long-distance call, so I’d better say good-bye. See you both soon, and no, you don’t get to watch TV until I get there.” Gaby heard Connor’s good-bye and hung up amid the flood of assurances from Carey.

  Sitting in the taxi from the airport to the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal, Gaby watched the raindrops chasing each other down the window. People said that the future of the area was going to be over on the East Side where fancy neighborhoods were springing up to handle Boeing’s growth. But her family had always preferred the close-knit island community on Bainbridge. Passing through downtown Seattle, she saw tourists with their umbrellas staring at Seattle natives striding along in oblivious disregard of the drizzle. And what does that make me? Will Seattle ever feel like home?

  She’d asked her mother the same question ten years ago as rain streaked the breath-fogged windows of their little yellow VW. As she drove, Mama had glanced back over her shoulder as Gaby kept the two-year-old twins quiet in the backseat so Daddy could rest. “Now that we’re finally all together, we’re going to have a normal life,” Mama replied firmly. “And if Carey ever goes to sleep, we’re going to love it here.”

  And Mama laughed.

  Her mother smiled at them and loved them, twelve-year-old Gaby realized, but she couldn’t remember hearing her laugh since Daddy had left for the war against Haven two years before. If a normal life means mamas lau
gh and families are together, she had decided, then we’re going to have the most normal life there ever was. I’ll go to a regular school, and nobody will know we’re from Null City. They won’t know about gifts manifesting, or about fathers getting hurt in a war nobody’s ever heard of, or that Parkers are anything but normal.

  But ten years later as Gaby got out of her taxi and stood in the rain at the ferry, she worried, as always, about the twins. All too soon Connor and Carey would have to decide whether to accept their heritage as harmonia, able to perceive hidden patterns, or return to Null City with its own imposed version of normal life—at the cost of whatever unique gifts and abilities they might be developing.

  Gaby’s thoughts turned from worry about the twins to worry about what Luic was going to say when she told him she suspected Harry Daniels—his best friend from childhood—was systematically bleeding off his assets.

  “No. He’s not.” Luic’s usually pure tones sounded gritty and strained. His mouth, which she thought might have—almost—smiled when he first saw her, now pressed into a grim line. “Not Harry.” To get away from possible ears at his hotel, they were strolling through Pike Place Market. “I’ve known Harry most of my life. If he wanted anything, he would just ask for it. And I’d give it to him. Something else is going on, and you’re supposed to be the one figuring it out.”

  Glacial fury iced his blue eyes as he stalked ahead of Gaby. Even in the market crowds, she had no trouble following his tall figure until he finally stopped at a stall selling handmade kaleidoscopes. He waited until she caught up to him before changing the subject. “Our new album is going to be called Kaleidoscope.” He picked one up. “We’re looking for cover images.” While he discussed the kaleidoscope’s design and construction with the artist, Gaby pretended to examine the instruments, only to replace each one into precise parallel lines containing groups of three or five instruments. When Luic looked back at her, Gaby ran her hands over the smooth polished wood of an exquisitely crafted little instrument trimmed in brass. She raised her eyebrows but murmured her thanks when Luic paid for it and handed it to her.

  “How did you meet Harry?” she asked as they walked on. “Look, I’m not prying into your life or anything, but everything I’ve uncovered in New York this past month points to someone close to you. As far as I can tell, that’s an exclusive club, and Harry is the only member. So explain why it’s impossible for it to be Harry.”

  “Have you seen the bio the record label puts out?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Poor boy from Louisiana gets his first guitar at twelve and writes his first hit song at sixteen. He forms a band with his best friend and starts cranking out the hits…”

  “They left out a few things.” Luic stepped over to the window to stare out at the waterfront.

  “Like the part where we met when we were twelve because we ended up in the same group house. Neither one of us had one person on Earth who gave a damn if we lived or died. Miss Rachel, who ran the place, gave us the guitars on loan and told us we better hang onto them and each other because the world wasn’t going to give us anything. For the past fifteen years, Harry and I have hung on. He bailed me out of jail a few times, and a few other times we ended up there together. He tells me when a song stinks, and when I tell him to go to hell, he says only if I’m going there too.” She heard the words he didn’t say. The one person he trusted completely was Harry. She wondered how he would survive if that trust was broken.

  “Right, then. Not Harry.” She looked down at the little kaleidoscope she was turning over in her hands. “But somebody really clever has gone to a lot of trouble to hide almost all traces of what’s going on. I’m damn good, and I barely figured out this much. Whoever is doing this not only buried it deep, but even deeper, planted clues pointing to Harry.”

  Her lips were pressed against the words she couldn’t say. Luic, I’m not good with people. I don’t say the things a good accountant would say. But my family are harmonia, and for me that gift means the numbers dance into patterns telling me things no accountant could know. And Luic, the dance leads to Harry.

  She looked at him. “I know you don’t want to know the accounting, but we’ll need coffee. We’re going to go over this point by point, and you’re going to have to help me see if I made a mistake. And since I do not make mistakes, you might be the only one who can figure out what’s going on.”

  LEILA, Chapter Two

  2012, Provence

  “I don’t want it,” Leila told Mr. Chapel in London.

  She’d said the same thing to Mom back in Atlanta when his damn letter came about the inheritance from her birth mother. Leila thought there could not have been two more different people in the world than her gracious Southern mother and the stiff British lawyer, but their responses were identical. “You’ve already got it.”

  A week later she landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. Alone. Mom had said there were things she needed to hear from Mr. Chapel and Dad was about to be released from the hospital.

  In London, the reserved young lawyer—“He’s called a solicitor,” Mom told her—gave her the velvet-covered jewelry box he said had been her birth mother’s. Then he asked if she wanted tea with biscuits. And a chateau. In France.

  Leila was in shock as she left Chapel House. She opened the door to see a blonde girl staring at the doorbell as if trying to decide whether to ring. “Go ahead,” Leila told her. “They’re giving away castles today.”

  By the next morning, Leila was driving a minuscule rented car toward the tiny French village of Fontaine Hantée, glaring occasionally at the jewelry box on the passenger seat next to her. “Don’t get me wrong, Box,” she told it. “I like bling and fancy houses as much as the next girl. But my Egg/Sperm Donors didn’t want me when Mom and Dad adopted me, and leaving me stuff isn’t going to change that. So I don’t want you any longer than it takes to sell you and whatever that chateau turns out to be.”

  Even if she was in a car so small she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to drive it or pedal it, at least in France she could drive on the right side of the road. After London, where driving meant shifting with the wrong hand while driving down the wrong side of the street into roundabouts guaranteed to torture unsuspecting Americans, French countryside driving was almost fun. Azure skies, billowing clouds, stunning mountain vistas—Leila shook her head. There probably wasn’t a Starbucks between here and Marseilles. Why, why, why did I let Mom talk me into this?

  Oh yeah, she remembered. Mom never needed to beg or plead. Dad used to say, “How many Southern Mamas does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: ‘Oh y’all don’t need to bother about me. I’ll just sit here in the dark…’”

  “You’re going the bloody wrong way. Turn around when possible.” That Australian GPS voice had seemed funnier when she loaded it onto her smartphone back in Atlanta. The navigation screen showed a complete blank, as if Leila had driven off the edge of the world. One more corner and she breathed a sigh of relief to see the sign proclaiming her destination, Fontaine Hantée.

  She realized two things as she stepped out of her car. First, the village―a small square with one optimistically titled pizza restaurant, a church, La Poste, and a few streets branching off―probably wasn’t hiding a Starbucks behind one of those sets of faded shutters. Second, her Jimmy Choos were not going to survive the Fontaine Hantée residents’ disregard for any type of leash law.

  “Thanks, Mom.” She saluted her mother’s training—wear designer but carry backup sneakers. Bending over to replace her suede flats with the emergency Keds®, she heard a voice behind her. “Miss Rice?”

  Leila stood so quickly she hit her head on the roof of her toy car. Between the dizziness and the sun in her eyes, she thought the giant in front of her was shimmering around the edges. He put out a big hand to steady her elbow, and she flinched as a spark leaped across in the dry air.

  “I’m Leila Rice.” She tried a tentative smile. He didn’t smile back as his hand dropped away. />
  “My grandfather asked me to meet you.” His English was better than hers. “I’m Thomas Chapel.”

  Not a man, she realized. He was maybe a few years younger than her eighteen years. As she looked up at him—and up, and up—she got an impression of feet, elbows, and ears way too big, even for the giant frame they adorned. White-blond hair spilled into the pale-gray eyes glaring down at her.

  Okay, so she wasn’t in line for Miss America, but mirrors didn’t break when she looked in them. Leila knew what he was seeing—a small, wiry girl with green eyes and the mass of brown-black hair her friend Marnie called The Great Uncombable. She also knew, despite the eighteen candles on her most recent birthday cake, she looked about the same age as he did—maybe fourteen in the right light. So why’s he acting like I just took away his puppy and cancelled Christmas?

  “You can’t drive up the streets to our house, so you’ll have to leave your car down here. I can take your suitcase and maybe get tea,” he offered grudgingly. He looked her over and added, “Or coffee?”

  “Coffee,” she said reverently. “Coffee would be a good thing.” She followed him up a street so steep and narrow it had steps instead of pavement. Branches heavy with ripe apples hung over walls warmed by the afternoon sun. There must have been dogs too—lots of them by the looks of the stones beneath her Keds she was mentally assuring herself would so not be going back in her suitcase.

  “Does anyone live here?” She gestured at the empty streets, whose only occupants were several cats serenely monitoring her progress.

  “During the middle of the day it seems pretty deserted, but they’ll be out later. And…” He hesitated. “They don’t like our family, so they stay away from us. Here, this is our house.”

  Fontaine Hantée didn’t go in much for a celebration of the individual, at least if the houses were any indicator. As far as Leila could tell, Thomas’ stone house with its sun-leached shutters and door was identical to every other house in the village.