The look of shock on Micah’s face when she’d informed him she would be staying in D.C. for an undetermined time replayed mercilessly in her head. He had been more than surprised or disappointed. He’d stared at her as if the floor had just opened up beneath him. As if he couldn’t have gotten any worse news than the fact that she was not going to be boarding a flight for Rome at any moment.
If nothing else, it was better that she understood how he truly felt, even at the cost of her pride. She’d lived far too long and endured more than enough loss than to waste another moment feeling like a fool for allowing herself to get swept away on thoughts of fate and destiny.
Maybe Micah had it right after all.
Maybe their shared dream of the white doe in the Deadlands was just that. Nothing but a dream.
Maybe soul bonds and fated mates really were just a lot of Atlantean love-and-light bullshit.
She scoffed under her breath, reaching for her phone to call Sia. She needed to feel grounded in something real again, and a chat with her friend was a good place to start.
Before her fingers had closed around the device, a knock sounded on the other side of her closed door, followed by Zael’s voice.
“Phaedra, are you in there?”
She set down the phone and went to let him in. “Is anything wrong?”
“It’s Jenna. She had a vision a few minutes ago.” The former Atlantean royal guard was never one to rattle, but there was no mistaking the gravity in his voice. “Jenna saw the two missing crystals—the ones that were used to destroy Atlantis. She knows where they are.”
Phaedra couldn’t hide her shock. “You mean she saw them in the Ancient’s memories?”
Zael gave a grim nod. “There’s more, Phaedra. She’s in the war room downstairs. Lucan has called everyone in the command center to come and hear what she has to say.”
She nodded, hurrying after Zael. They were the last to arrive in the war room. Gideon and Savannah were gathered around the large conference table with Gabrielle and Brynne, Tegan and Elise, as well as Sterling Chase and his daywalker mate, Tavia. Micah, Darion, and Jax were on the other side of the table beside Nathan and Jordana. Micah glanced Phaedra’s way as she entered with Zael and they took their places near everyone else. As for the rest of the room, all eyes were trained on Jenna, who stood beside Brock at the end opposite of Lucan.
“Go ahead,” the Order’s leader said, giving Jenna a grim nod. “Tell them what you just told me.”
Phaedra listened in astonishment as Jenna went on to describe what she’d witnessed through her strange connection to the Ancient who had left his indelible mark upon her before his death.
No one said a word as she relayed detail upon detail of the Ancient’s trek through a dense boreal forest where the alien wreckage had lain undisturbed for millennia, cloaked on the ground where it had crashed.
She told them about the advanced circuitry and systems the Ancient had tried unsuccessfully to repair, about the life pods and the pair of bodies stowed in the rear of the ship.
And then she told them about the two Atlantean crystals the Ancient had stored there too. How he had programmed a detonation trigger into the ship, then synced the protocol with the biotechnology chip he’d carried in his forearm.
The same chip that now resided in Jenna.
“Life or death,” she murmured. “He made me choose one or the other that night in my cabin. He wasn’t just talking about my life, though. With the crystals on board that ship, then should it blow, he was talking about eradicating every living thing on this planet. That trigger was set to detonate if and when his life ended. Now, I’m the one carrying that burden.”
“Holy hell.” Lucan’s deep voice was airless, his face stark with obvious dread.
It was a feeling clearly shared by everyone in the room, Phaedra included. No one said anything for a long moment, the entire gathering gone silent under the weight of what Jenna had just revealed.
Brock gathered her against him, his arm around her shoulders as tender as his gaze. “I’m never going to let anything happen to you, Jenna. I made you that promise a long time ago, before we understood anything about that damn chip and what it might do to you.”
“Yes, you did,” she whispered, leaning into his embrace. “I’ve never been this scared of what he did to me, though. The changes in my body, the awful visions . . . I can handle all of that. Making me live with this is the cruelest part of his assault on me.”
Brock kissed the top of her head. “We’re in this together, baby. If you’re scared, you just keep holding on to me. I’ll always keep you safe.”
“It’s been more than two decades since the last Ancient died,” Gabrielle interjected quietly from her place next to Lucan.
“Yes, it’s been twenty years since he died,” Savannah said. “But he was held captive in Dragos’s lab for about twice that long, and before then Dragos had kept him in another kind of prison for centuries.”
Elise nodded. “Which means Jenna’s vision must have taken place during the time before. All the way back to the Middle Ages.”
Tegan bit off a low curse. “So, that fucking ship’s just been sitting out there abandoned and forgotten in the Deadlands somewhere all this time.”
“That would be the best scenario,” Lucan replied.
