Dark Deceiver Read Free Page B

confusion lifting from his eyes. “What brings you here?”
    â€œWhich boat is Larsen Vale’s?”
    The man motioned Kaderil to the window and pointed to the boat in the last slip. “That’s hers down there. That’s not Larsen on the boat, though. Looks as if she has company.” A lone person walked across the deck, a tall woman with hair like flame. A woman who was not, apparently, his quarry. But she was on a Sitheen’s boat. As good a place to start as any.
    His pulse leaped with possibility. Even if she wasn’t Larsen Vale, she might know her, or be a Sitheen herself. Already, the day was looking up.
    Kaderil turned and left the marina office. Behind him he heard a distant, “Good to see you again, Kade. Always a pleasure.” Belatedly, he remembered he should have said thank-you or goodbye.
    But his patience for the trivial was thin. He had a draggon stone to track down and Sitheen to destroy. And two short weeks to accomplish both.
    Long enough, perhaps, for he had an advantage they would never suspect. He looked like them. They wouldn’t know he was Esri.
    Until too late.
    Â 
    A siren sounded in the distance, rising over the clank and splash of the tie lines, making Autumn’s stomach hurt. Every time she turned on the news, another bizarre death was being reported in D.C. Every time she heard a siren, she wondered how many more people had died because of the Esri. How many more murders she might have prevented if she hadn’t let that kid go.
    A chilly breeze blew a loose wisp of hair in her face as she made her way across the swaying deck of the houseboat to the makeshift desk she’d set up near the back rail. The setting sun over the water blinded her with its brilliance. She grabbed her chair, as much to secure her balance as to move it to the other side of the small table that held her laptop.
    Larsen had offered up her unoccupied boat when Autumn had needed a place to stay for a few weeks while her apartment was being repaired after a pipe burst in the unit above hers. In hindsight, she wished she’d taken her less-than-stellar coordination into consideration when she’d decided to live in a moving house. The boat was one of dozens moored at the Top Sail Marina on the Potomac River. Across the river rose the office towers of the very urban Virginia suburbs.
    Autumn plopped down in front of her laptop as a pair of gulls cried overhead. For two weeks she’d been trying to find a clue to the other Esri stones. She might not be much of a soldier, but she was a crack researcher, and finding the stones was her only chance to make up for letting that Esri kid go.
    Her current research path followed the acquisition records for the Stone of Ezrie: the stone whose scent Baleris had apparently followed to find the gate between the worlds, the stone the Esri called the draggon stone, according to Tarrys. Tarrys was the second of Baleris’s slaves, a pretty little thing, barely five feet tall, who had actually helped them defeat Baleris, then stayed after his death.
    Before Baleris’s arrival, the draggon stone had been doing time as a Smithsonian artifact. A thumb-size pale blue teardrop on a silver chain, the thing had appeared innocuous enough. What made it unique was the seven-pointed star etched on its surface and the legend that it was the key to the gates of Ezrie—a legend, it turned out, that was all too true. If the Esri got their hands on that stone and took it back through the gate, the seals on all twelve gates around the world would instantly dissolve. The Esri could still only get through during the midnight hour of a full moon, but the thought of Baleris’s reign of terror times twelve…every month…was enough to give ulcers to the bravest of souls.
    She shivered and reached for the zipper on her jacket. If the draggon stone was a key, what was the purpose of the other Esri stones the kid had mentioned? Were they