“Do you know anything about a book? I think it’s called
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The guy turned heads. You couldn’t avoid looking at him, but apart from the good looks even Gray could appreciate there was some undefinable quality about him.
“Why are you asking me?” Gray said.
Sykes didn’t flinch or blink. He gave Gray a long dark blue stare, an unnerving stare. “I think you’re mentioned in the book.”
“What book?”
Sykes made an impatient sound. “Just call it the book of the Millets’ lives. Our history—and to some degree, our future. At least, that’s what I think it is. I haven’t actually…I’ve only seen it, not touched it.”
“So how do you know what’s in it?”
Sykes took a while to say, “The pages have turned in my mind.”
Gray kept on watching the other man’s face.
“Willow told me to come to you. She’s our sister the skeptic, but I couldn’t find anyone else to ask and she said you know things if you want to share.”
“I don’t know,” Gray said.
They were jostled by passersby trying to get a better look at Caged Birds.
Gray moved nearer to the buildings leaving the sidewalk for the gawkers, and Sykes followed him. “Did Willow say why she thought you should talk to me?”
“I read a page in
“Slay dragons?” Gray felt the need to move, fast, only he didn’t know where to go. “If you couldn’t touch the book, how could you read so much?”
“I told you. The pages were turned for me. I saw them in my mind.” Sykes raised his hands and they were curled into fists. “If you understand at all, let go of unbelief and tell me. I have to find the book, but that can wait. It has already waited for centuries. Now I have to find Marley.”
“Dragons,” Gray said softly, hearing Blades’s detached Komodo Dragon announcement. “They kill with their teeth.”
“You do know something,” Sykes said, taking him by the shoulders. “Help me to help her.”
“I can’t. I have to follow where I’m led.” He wasn’t sure where his words came from.
Looking at the sidewalk, Gray seemed to see small sparks fire. A force field closed around him, closed him in with Sykes. “She’s in danger,” he said.
“You are Bonded to her?”
He raised his face and nodded. “Yes.”
“When you—touch—you are energized?”
“If that’s all you can call it, yes.”
Sykes gave a thin smile. “And the marks Willow spoke of? On the inside?”
“They’re there.”
“Do you know the reason for them?” Sykes asked.
“To punish me. To teach me obedience when I was a child. I don’t know anything else except that I must have had powers I was afraid to use afterward and I forced them from my mind. I’ve been trying to touch Marley, to bring her to me, but she doesn’t answer. I’m too new at this to know what I’m doing.”
“You are returning to your true self. Do you believe you are part of a world very few come to know?”
Gray said, “Yes,” surprising himself with his rapid response. “Marley and I have been able to communicate… without speaking aloud. And I’ve seen things she’s seen. I believe I was meant to be with her.”
“Good.” A pleased smile gave Sykes a piratical air of satisfaction. “Welcome.”
“Thanks.” It seemed the only thing to say.
“Pascal, my uncle, asked me to find her, but she’s being closed off from me,” Sykes said. “That should be impossible…unless she’s a party to it.”
“You mean she could be choosing to stop us from getting to her.”
Sykes nodded slowly.
“Is it possible for someone else to shut her away?” Gray asked.
Sykes jaw clenched. “Anything is possible.”
“The mentor would know,” Gray said quietly.
Gasping, Sykes took a step backward. “What do you know about the Mentor?”
Gray hoped he hadn’t done the wrong thing in mentioning the shadowy man. “I have seen him. He has spoken to me.”
“Impossible. We don’t even know if he exists.”
“He exists. Not the way we do, but he’s here when he wants to be.”
Excitement raised Sykes’s color. “You were sent to Marley,” he said.
“Should I try to ask the Mentor for help?”
“It’s our way to deal with our own problems. We have never asked for help.”
“But he came to me.” He thought better of saying he found the Millets hardheaded.
“Perhaps he’ll come to you again,” Sykes said, and Gray didn’t miss the hopeful note. “He must have made a decision he struggled with. You are Bonded to Marley, but you are not a Millet. He showed himself to you for his own special reasons.”
“To help me help Marley,” Gray said. “He bent his own rules.”
Sykes gave the ghost of a smile.
“You were at Royal Street?” Gray asked.
“No.”
“Then we start there.”
“Uncle Pascal said she isn’t there.”
“I think she is or that’s where we’ll find something to help us,” Gray said. “I know she was going. I drove her there. That’s where I’ll start looking for her.”
“Let’s go, then,” Sykes said and Gray was glad.
By foot was the fastest way to travel while the traffic was so snarled. They ran all the way, dodging and darting, bringing cars to a screeching halt, raising angry shouts from people who got in their path.
The trip took longer than Gray wanted it to, but anything would have been too long. Finally he turned onto Royal Street and sprinted until a hot-dog cart stopped him.
Sykes, with Gray thumping into him in the process, all but fell through the door at J. Claude Millet Antiques.
They were met by a wildly barking Winnie, who jumped up and down on the ugly gold fainting couch.
“Shh,” Willow said. She and Pascal faced the two newcomers as if they’d been waiting for them.
“Anything?” Pascal said to Sykes.
“Willow was right about him,” Sykes said, hooking a thumb in Gray’s direction. “There’s a Bonding.”
Pascal Millet was a muscular, striking man who shaved his head and looked at the world with yet another pair of those extraordinary green Millet eyes. He assumed the expression of a watchful father looking over a teenage boy come to take his daughter to the prom.
“I was sure there was,” Pascal said. “I felt it.”
“So did I,” Willow said, and when they looked at her she pushed her mouth out in an O. “I mean, I sorta thought…”
“You said what you meant,” Sykes said. “You are in tune just as the rest of us are. About time, too. We all have our jobs to do in this family.”
“Except you,” Willow snapped back. “You think you can do what you like.”
“That’s what you think,” Sykes said. “Enough squabbling, sis, we have to find Marley. Uncle, is my father back in London yet?”
Gray frowned at him, not understanding.
“Yes,” Pascal said. “He went straight back.”
