Bloodline

He was out with her tonight.

I’ll take what I can get.

Mary pointed to the screen door. “You kids enjoy the night. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower. If he gets restless, I’m taping the Nationals game against the marlins. A little baseball quiets him right down. Unless it’s against the Yankees, then the gloves come off.”

Gray smiled. “Thanks, Mary.”

9:45 P.M.

Seichan stood in the dark gazebo, waiting, lost in her own thoughts. It was a balmy night, with crickets chirping in a continuous chorus, and a few fireflies blinking in the bushes and tree limbs.

She stared back at the house, wondering who she would be if she grew up there, picturing a happy childhood of report cards, scraped knees, and first kisses.

Would I even be me?

She fingered the silver dragon pendant resting in the hollow of her throat, remembering Robert Gant’s last words.

Your mother… escaped… still alive…

Over the past week, she’d slowly allowed herself to believe it.

It scared her.

Even her father’s death was no more than a dull ache, with no sharp edges to it. She didn’t know him and never really wanted to. Her mother had raised her. The word father had no meaning in her childhood. And a part of her still burned with anger and resentment, for the abuse and horrors she had to endure to become a killer. What father would allow that to happen to his daughter?

Still, in the end, Robert Gant had granted her a truer gift than his fatherhood: hope.

She didn’t know what to do with that gift.

Not yet.

But she would… with help.

Gray appeared at the back door, limned against the warmth of the kitchen lights. She liked spying on him when he didn’t know she was watching. She caught glimpses of the boy behind the man, the son of two parents who had loved Gray in very different ways.

Still, he was a killer-but not like her.

She was a machine; he was human.

She pictured the girl in the lobby of the Burj Abaadi, a girl broken into a monster. She pictured Petra, a woman molded into one.

Seichan was both of them.

What does he see in me worth holding on to?

Gray crossed the yard, stirring fireflies. Overhead, a falling star flashed across the dark night. He reached her, a shadow now.

She trembled.

He saw something in her-and she had to trust him.

He held out a hand.

Offering everything.

She took it.

EPILOGUE

It crouches on the rock, basking in the sun, charging its solar cells.

It listens for the sounds of danger, but all it hears is the crash of water over rock, the call of winged creatures. It watches for movement but sees only the shimmer of grass, the shake of leaves. It looks for heat but only finds hot rocks.

As the sunlight fills the hollow hunger inside it, making it stronger, it reviews and remembers.

Linked to the others, it had listened as their chorus shrank to nothing.

The silence deafened.

In that silence, it learned a new pattern.

THE END .

Once fully charged, it knows to move on; to stop is THE END.

It does not want that.

It rises on its powerful piston legs, knuckling on curved claws. It moves back into the deep shadow of the woods, where few will know it passes.

It is alone.

It will learn new patterns and adapt.

It must survive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

They say too many cooks in the kitchen is a bad thing. That may apply to the culinary arts, but certainly not the literary arts. Each person mentioned below has made this book better. The first group I hate to lump together, but you all came that way, so what’s a guy to do? They are my first readers, my first editors, and some of my best friends: Sally Barnes, Chris Crowe, Lee Garrett, Jane O’Riva, Denny Grayson, Leonard Little, Scott Smith, Penny Hill, Judy Prey, Dave Murray, Will Murray, Caroline Williams, John Keese, Christian Riley, and Amy Rogers. And, as always, a special thanks to Steve Prey for the additional handsome maps and artwork… and to Cherei McCarter for all the fodder for great stories! To Scott Brown, M.D., for the medical help (so see, you are in the novel), and Mihir Wanchoo for being there from the beginning. To Carolyn McCray, who finally gets to let her own star shine… and David Sylvian for picking up all the pieces and making my digital presence shine. To everyone at HarperCollins for always having my back: Michael Morrison, Liate Stehlik, Seale Ballenger, Danielle Bartlett, Josh Marwell, Lynn Grady, Adrienne di Pietro, Richard Aquan, Tom Egner, Shawn Nicholls, Ana Maria Allessi, Olga Gardner, and Wendy Lee (I’ll miss you). Lastly, of course, a special acknowledgment to the four people instrumental to all levels of production: my editor, Lyssa Keusch, and her colleague Amanda Bergeron; and my agents, Russ Galen and Danny Baror. And, as always, I must stress that any and all errors of fact or detail in this book fall squarely on my own shoulders.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO READERS: TRUTH OR FICTION

A good poker player tries to never show his cards. He endeavors to hold them close to his chest, doing his best to hide whether he’s got the winning hand or is bluffing. That’s what an author does, too: blurs that line between truth and fiction. But here, at the end of each novel, I like to come clean, to lay my cards on the table, to expose what’s true and what’s not.

And I’ll certainly be doing that again here, but this time around, I thought I’d take a lesson from Dr. Lisa Cummings. She states in this novel, The proof is in the pudding. So, besides drawing that line between truth and fiction, I’m going to pepper this section with a fair number of links to videos and Web pages, where readers can see firsthand some of the sources and inspirations behind events in this book.