The Seventh Stone (12 page)

Acrid smoke lingered from the gunshot. Her head throbbed worse than her arm. She pushed up on all fours, and rocked back onto her heels. She closed her throat to stop from puking. A hole had punched through the sleeve of her leather jacket. A bloody slash creased across her arm, halfway between her wrist and elbow.

Percival stumbled out the front door and down the stairs. He wore red and blue plaid pajamas with matching bathrobe cinched at the waist and leather slide slippers. His slender fingers clasped the butt of Dad’s Smith and Wesson pistol, the one he kept locked up. He rushed to her. The Town Car screeched around the corner. He knelt by her, grasped her arm. “By God, Christa, you’ve been shot.”

Stars floated in her eyes. It was the adrenaline; she’d soldiered through a lot worse injuries than the bullet graze. And Percy holding a gun was more dizzying than the bash on the head. “The kids, Percy. Where’s Lucia and Liam?”

“
In school, of course,” he said. “Helen took them. That is, Lucia is in school. Liam wasn’t feeling well. Helen took him to the campus clinic. They’ve been with her since yesterday. I just don’t understand, Christa. I mean, what is this all about? Your father calls, insists our children have to go to your sister’s, for their safety, he said, and it’s a good thing he did, mind you.”

“
Percy,” she said, too loudly. It hurt. “Where is Gabriella?”

“
Colombia. I’ve been trying to reach her. She’s left for the jungle, where she was last summer, searching for medicinal plants. I couldn’t fathom why it couldn’t wait until after the holidays. She insisted that her research was at a crucial stage, that she absolutely had to track down a new specimen. I’ve never seen her so anxious.”

“
Gabby’s in Colombia? No, scratch that. Dad called?”

“
He alerted me to a package coming for you, here. It arrived this morning. He’s in Morocco. Did you know that?”

“
Package?”

“
That thug was after it,” he said, looking again down the street, then up the street. “He tried to shoot me. I promised your father. Nobody was to have that package but you. I had to protect it with my life, he said. I am not your father, Christa.”

No, he wasn’t. Percival was a wonderful man, intelligent, kind, a loving, dedicated husband and father, but adventure to him was riding the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyworld twice. “You did fine, Percy. Where’s the package?”

“
That brute took it,” he said. “I tried to stop him.”

“
He didn’t take it.” She stood on rubber legs. “He dropped it, somewhere in the pachysandra.” Fighting off the dizziness, she scanned the tangle of low green leaves. Percival slid the gun into his bathrobe pocket. He swam his hands and waded his slippered feet through the dense groundcover.

He swooped up the book and raised it above his head in triumph. “I’ve got it.”

She stepped back. She swallowed a new threat of nausea. He held a worn, stained, leather notebook, held together with a leather strap that she had braided on Father’s Day when she was ten. “Not a book,” she said. “Dad’s journal.” Dad’s Bible, the three sisters called it, with both respect and disdain. He kept all his notes, ideas, and inspirations on the Breastplate of Aaron in it. “The one we burned in effigy last Christmas.” Long after Percy and the kids were asleep in bed. She and Gabby were drunk. Dad hadn’t shown up for the holiday, again.

Percy looked at the journal as if it were diseased. “This is the book you always talk about? It can’t be. Gabby said that your father would sooner cut off his right hand than part with this.”

She reached out her open palm. He balanced the journal on it. It was Dad’s soul, in her hands.

Percival stepped back, scanning the ground. “The letter,” he said. “He sent a letter with it, an old letter. It was here, with the journal.”

“
There!” Christa said. The paper was skimming along the top of the pachysandra, lifted by the breeze.

Percy chased after it. He scooped it up as it swerved onto the sidewalk. A corner of the yellowed paper broke off and flew away in a gust. “It’s written in Latin,” he said. “Your father said it was the key. The key to what, Christa? No, don’t tell me. I don’t like my family being brought into this.”

“
Too late,” she said. As they hurried back to the house, she recapped what had happened at the cliff dwelling. His face grew paler with each description, but he didn’t once show disbelief, not of Samuel’s dying words, the shapeshifters, the creepy Prophet. She’d show him the sphere later. Right now, she needed to focus on that letter.

“
Christa, your father didn’t sound like himself when he called. He sounded,” he rubbed his chin and cast his gaze down, “weak.”

“
Injured?” she asked.

“
He said he was fine.”

Which meant he must be badly hurt.

“
Christa, I love your father, you know that, but if he has put my family in danger–”

“
I’m sure that wasn’t his intention,” she said. It never was. He always claimed his work was vital to keeping his family safe, whatever that meant. “Call the school,” she said. “Tell them that Lucia needs to be picked up early. I’ll call Helen.”

She punched in her sister’s cell number.

“
Christa,” Helen answered, her voice sharp. “Thank God.”

Helen often thanked God, but never before for Christa. “Helen, what’s the matter?”

“
I’ve been trying to reach Percival,” she said. Christa could hear children crying in the background. “His phone isn’t working. Gabriella is in Colombia, although why she’d leave her family six days before Christmas is beyond me. And I thought you flew off to Arizona.” It was more an accusation than a question.

“
Just got back. I’m at Gabby’s house now.” She hurried up the front steps. “Percival wants Lucia picked up early from school.”

“
I can’t leave here,” Helen shot back. “We’re still at the doctor’s office. The place is like a madhouse today. I had to turn off my cell phone. Were you trying to reach me?”

“
You’re still at the clinic?”

“
Doctor Templeton still can’t figure out what’s wrong with Liam. The doctor says it’s just a bad headache, although he’s scratching his head over Liam’s rash. I know it’s something more serious. I know it is.” Helen was never one to accept an optimistic diagnosis. Gabriella, the eldest, could find a positive side to moldy bread. The middle sister, Helen, could find black in a rainbow. Helen had become an ardent Christian because she saw eternal damnation in every sunset. “You know Liam. He never complains. If he says he has a headache, it must be bad. Something’s going around. There’s a pack of sick kids here. Moms don’t look too good, either.”

“
Percival is worried,” said Christa. “Me, too.”

“
Worried?” she shot back. “We all agree? Then it truly is God’s will.”

Christa cringed. Helen wouldn’t butter her toast in the morning unless she felt God wanted her to. “What about Peter?” Helen and Peter loved those kids like their own, if they could have one or six.

“
Peter’s due back today, but his flight is delayed,” she said. “I called the kids’ school; let them know what’s going on. I’m telling you. It’s an epidemic, worse than swine flu. I’m already planning to pick up Lucia before she is exposed. Someone has to take care of these kids. And that means me. Got to go. The doctor’s finally calling us in.” With that, she hung up.

As Percival made his phone calls, she ducked into the powder room and washed her wound. It wasn’t bad, just a graze. She’d gotten worse bruises fencing. She plastered it with Barbie bandages. That was twice in twenty-four hours she’d been shot at. Good thing she didn’t believe bad things came in threes. Six, seven, maybe. This was far from over.

She headed for the library. Despite its dark walnut paneling, glum oxblood draperies and overall gloomy visage, this was her favorite room in Gabby’s home. More importantly, it was the repository for the arcane texts their parents had collected. Gabriella hadn’t so much inherited them as accepted their guardianship.

She crossed to the massive partners desk that came with the house because it was too heavy to move. Behind it, the painting of the hunting dogs framed in gold protruded like an open door from the wall. It hid the wall safe. They all made fun of that painting, it also came with the house, but Gabriella did use the safe for one thing, to lock Dad’s old gun away from the kids. For Liam, the hidden safe had been the main reason for them to buy the house. He had spent many afternoons exploring the old Victorian for secret passages, and when none appeared, built them in his imagination.

She shrugged off her lucky pack and righted the wooden desk chair from where it had toppled to the floor. She rolled it in close to the desk. Dad’s journal, here, in her hands. Those hungry lions in the Serengeti and the frigid waves swamping their canoe in the Tasman Sea were nothing compared to the terror of opening this small book. It was like admitting Dad was dead, or close to it. He’d laugh at her trepidation.
Haven’t I always taught you that the greatest fear is that of the unknown?

She sucked in a deep breath and opened the cover. But she’d seen most of this before. Dad constantly reviewed these pages with her. Most of them she could have written herself on their crazy expeditions to unearth long lost clues. The last pages were new, notes of his dig in the Roman ruins along the Moroccan coast, following up the lead of that old Vatican guard he’d stumbled across. Then, in weaker script, a note,

To Christa: I made a promise to your mother. It has fallen upon you to fulfill it. I’ve found it, Salvatierra’s letter, the man who started all this. It’s time you learned about the Circle of Seven. You, Christa, are the new guardian of the Tear of the Moon Emerald, like your mother before you. It was her dying wish, and may be mine. Write the ending to our story, Christa. Millions of lives may depend on it. Never give up. Your loving father, Thaddeus.

Dying wish. Millions of lives
. Dad certainly hadn’t lost his sense of melodrama. And she hadn’t lost her need for denial, or burden of guilt, or, for that matter, her stubborn determination to make things right.

Salvatierra’s letter. Dad had actually found the letter she had argued couldn’t possibly exist. It had been the breaking point that made her abandon Dad and his quest. And here it was in her trembling hands. The date, February 14, 1586. The flowing script written with quill and ink, true to the period. The language, Latin. The yellowed parchment was splotched with red that looked like blood.

Percival entered the room. He laid her cell phone on the corner of the desk. With two fingers, he removed the pistol from his bathrobe pocket like the gun was infected and set it next to the cell phone.

The letter’s script was shaky but beautifully crafted Latin. A few old Spanish words, derived from the spoken Latin, stood out. And now, the signature. “Juan Jaramillo de Salvatierra,” she said aloud, her voice dry. She leaned back and swallowed hard.

Percival leaned in closer. “It’s the letter,” he said, “the one your father had been searching for. I didn’t believe it really existed.”

“
Neither did I,” Christa said. “Dad sent this here? From Morocco?”

“
It arrived this morning.”

“
I’ll need Dad’s Latin-English dictionary, third shelf down, the Cassell’s not the Oxford.”

He crossed to the bookcases and ran his finger along the spines. “Gabriella should not have gone to Colombia. I need her.”

“
And she needs you.” She moved aside a scattering of Gabriella’s botanical sketches to make room for the laptop.

“
You’re right, of course,” he said. “It’s infuriating. I love her so I was desperate to stop her, but couldn’t stop her because I love her.” He heaved the heavy tome from the shelf, and manhandled it to the corner of the desk. He tore the glasses from his face and pointed them at her. “You know I will do anything to save my family, and my family includes you and your exasperating father.”

Percival was downright rugged beneath his mathematics nerd veneer, with a strong chin and brilliant blue eyes. He had the build of a welterweight boxer, all muscle and bone. It was scary how much he resembled her father at a younger age. “As will I,” she said. She bent over the letter and began keying in the translation with a heading.
Letter, written by Juan Jaramillo de Salvatierra to his brother, Pedro Alonso de Salvatierra, Vatican City. Vissilus Ruins, Morocco, February 14, 1586.

From the first line, this was going to challenge her courage more than her translation skills. “Juan Salvatierra writes that he was dying,” she said. “This is his last missive, maybe his last confession.” A confession was a sacrosanct vow, between priest and confessor, and, in this case, between brothers, but that wasn’t the worst part. This letter was the compass that her father had sacrificed years to find. “Dad would never have let this out of his hands unless he was desperate.” Unless he was, like Salvatierra wrote in his opening paragraph, near death.