“And that’s exactly why you’re not coming,” she grumbles. “You’re too hot. You’re gonna get us all killed.” Jasper is raging, so she grabs his face. “Jacob, look at me. I want him back too. Trust me, I do. And we’ll get him. But I need you level-headed. Not to mention, Velle needs you on lookout. If Felix is with us, we won’t have eyes on the west.”
“You really expect me to stand around with binoculars?” He hisses, then gulps. “Joy, he’s injured…”
“Yea, but he’s one of us, which means he’s tough, and he can take it,” she says. “We need to be smart here. If we tip The Ivory off in any way, it could get a lot worse.”
Jasper doesn’t look happy in the slightest. In fact, he looks miserable. But he concedes with a nod.
Joy smacks him gently on the cheek. “We’ll get him, and we’ll fucking win. Go tell them the plan. Watch for a signal to meet us here.” Jasper nods again, striding to the door. “And if you see Rook, tell him to hurry his ass up!”
Jasper is barely two steps outside when he mutters, “Uh… Joy…”
We turn as a man I’ve never seen before walks in with Rook…
Holding a gun to his head.
“Stay calm,” the man says. He has a distinct accent… “Nobody needs to get hurt. I am just looking for my son.”
Dash whips around. His face pales.
The man lowers his weapon. The lines of tension in his face smooth out as he stares at my fiancé. “Dascha…”
“What the fuck…” I breathe, my pulse almost knocking me down.
We’re all staring between the man and Dash as Dash finally blinks.
And whispers, “Hi, Dad.”
THE HISTORY OF ALABASTER ISLE
Part I: Island
Back in 1964, the US Government built a research facility off the coast of New York.
A plot of land was acquired, an island, by a small board of officials, and some private investors. As it turned out, this land, which had been uninhabited since long before New York was evenNew York, was technically not US soil.
You know what that means…
In the sixties, the board sent a lawyer, a subcontractor, and a surveyor to the island, to see what they were dealing with. They were pleasantly surprised to find a partial structure already standing. The makings of a large facility, though only a quarter of it had been built.
There was also a stone house, a game larder—like a root cellar only above ground—and a large tower that, from what they could tell, had no earthly reason for being there.
The lawyer was thrilled. He called the board members right away and told them the island possessed more than enough space for their facility, and that it even had something there they could use as a jumping-off point.
The subcontractor would get to work right away, bringing over landscapers and masons.
But the surveyor wasn’t as enthusiastic as the others. Really, he just wanted to understandwhythose things were there. Who had been on that island before them? And why hadn’t they finished the job?
As soon as he got back to the city, he began digging. And it took some time, long nights spent hunched over survey maps, census records, and historical society manifests. But eventually, he located something that chilled him to the bone.
When Dutch settlers came to the area in the seventeenth century, they found a family of aboriginal inhabitants of the Montaukett tribe. The settlers deemed the island too small and dangerous for colonization and left, only for King Charles I to order the island be given to a poet years later.
That’s right. A… poet.
This part wasn’t in the official history books—because… well, yea. But the surveyor found writings dating back to the 1630’s which strongly suggested this poetfriendof King Charles was actually hislover. And the island was less of agiftthan it was a simple ploy to keep him quiet and get him out of England.
Either way, there was no real record of exactly what happened next. All the surveyor knew was that, at the start of the eighteenth century, a wealthy aristocrat somehow inherited the island, naming it Alabaster Isle.
The aristocrat drew up plans to build himself a mansion on the island, adjacent to a museum to house his family’s artifacts. But that never happened either, and there were no records indicating why. There were, however, many articles detailing how the aristocrat was said to have died on the island, though no body was ever found.
