Standing up, Kaitlin wiped her hands down the side of her jeans.Ugh.She studied the two men for a second. They were both out cold. Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she texted her contact at the Metropolitan Police. Then she moved away, but waited, watching from the shadows in case they regained consciousness before the police arrived to collect them. She wanted another look inside their heads, but that could wait until tomorrow.
As the police car pulled up, she slipped away and headed for home.
Chapter 2
When Kaitlin got home, Josie was sitting on the sofa watching TV—a re-run of the midnight countdown. She wasn’t even flinching as the fireworks went off. Clearly, she was getting better.
Kaitlin had tried to persuade Josie to come along to the party, but she didn’t like fireworks and big bangs reminded her of the day her husband had been shot. Her husband had been a dickhead of the highest order. Kaitlin would have shot him herself if he wasn’t already dead. But Josie had believed she loved him. She’d been brainwashed—literally—the thoughts and memories stolen from her mind.
Kaitlin was the youngest and most powerful member of the Kindred, a covert operations group of telepaths who, up until three years ago, had believed they were working for the government. In fact, they’d been under the control of an immoral, clandestine organization—the Conclave. The Conclave secretly controlled much of the world for its own gain, and its leadership had been trying to find ways to control the Kindred’s telepathy for years.
They’d experimented on members of the group. Sam, Kaitlin’s twin brother, had died as a result. Josie had survived, but the experiments had left her little more than a shell, her telepathy gone, and her memories forgotten. She’d been deemed useless and scheduled for termination, but at the last minute, the person in charge of her case—a member high up in the Conclave—had seen her and fallen in love with her.
Or whatever.
Kaitlin wasn’t sure she believed in love. More likely, he’d seen the chance to have his own little Stepford wife. Josie was beautiful—like all the Kindred, she was tall, with black hair and blue eyes—but she also had an air of vulnerability absent in most of them. Though Kaitlin’s twin, Sam, had had a little of that as well.
That vulnerability would have no doubt appealed to a certain type of man.
Assholes, for instance.
The asshole had saved her, told her that she’d been in an accident, and she was suffering from amnesia. He’d said that they were in love and were getting married. And somehow, he’d convinced her it was true. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe deep down, Josie had wanted what he offered, what none of them had ever had—a normal life.
Hah! Who wanted to be normal anyway?
They’d all thought Josie was dead…until she’d popped up four years later, with no memory of any of them, including her twin sister, Sadie. Since then, they’d been searching for a way to get her fully back. So far, without any success.
Kaitlin tossed her phone and keys on the sideboard by the door and crossed the room. She switched off the TV.
“Hey, I was trying to see if I could spot you in the audience,” Josie said as Kaitlin plonked herself on the chair opposite her.
Kaitlin grinned. “I’m hard to miss. But now you’ve got the real thing.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“Super. Nothing like celebrating the fact that the end of the world is approaching fast.”
Josie studied her; her head cocked to one side. “You really believe that? The end of the world stuff, I mean. Not only that but the time travel and everything? Don’t you think it might just all be…made up?”
Kaitlin wished she could convince herself of that. And sometimes it did all seem so unreal. Improbable. Just downright unbelievable. But the sad fact was—she did believe it.
The ultimate proof was the fact that that fucker, Kane, one of the Guardians—the last remnants of the group that had been found in Africa all those years ago—had a real honest-to-God time machine in a cave in Uganda. And it had been there for a long time, long before such technology could possibly have existed.
Ergo, it had to have come from the future.
Which meant time travel was a real thing.
“I wish it was but no, I don’t think it’s made up. So, unless we find a way to stop it, most of humanity will die this year. And as we have no clue what’s going to cause it, we have pretty much zero chance of preventing it.”
They’d spent months searching for giant space rocks and signs of nuclear war and had come up with absolutely nothing. Zilch.
And that was a bugger, because she was only twenty-one, and way too young to die.
Josie was silent for a minute, though she didn’t look unduly concerned.
“That means it’s probably time for you to move down under,” Kaitlin said. According to Melody, the only people to survive the cataclysm had been in Australia.
Josie’s twin sister, Sadie, and her husband, Ethan, head of the Conclave and former enemy-number-one, had been spending a lot of time in Australia, moving the Conclave’s base of operations over there. Just in case. That was why Kaitlin was living with Josie.
