Missing

Suddenly the wave of emotion was more than he could handle. His chest became so tight that he found it difficult to breathe. There was an aching pressure behind his eyes. He knew it was his natural impulse to hold back his tears no matter how hard he had to strain. He took a deep breath and then another. He wanted nothing more than to stop reliving that night. He wished he could scrape it from his memory permanently. But he knew Gaia needed to hear it. And he also knew he needed to say it.

“I tried to protect you, Gaia....”

And then he was crying. He despised crying. He'd always thought it was weak and useless, self-indulgent. He hadn't even let himself cry that night. Instead he'd gone numb, blank, shut down.

Of course, that was exactly why he couldn't let it happen again.

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FRANCINE PASCAL

To Jonathan Rubin

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Copyright © 2001 by Francine Pascal

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eISBN-13: 978-0-7434-2257-4

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MISSING

She couldn't even begin to accept what was happening, but it didn't matter. Her brain had shut down.

 

IT WAS ALL HAPPENING SO FAST.

One moment melted quickly and imperceptibly into the next. Gaia found herself unable to remember the events of the last three minutes, let alone the last three hours—when she was still in Manhattan,
mired in that fluorescent den of Urban Outfitter dimwits called The Village School.
How had she gotten to this moment?

Her breaths were quick and shallow, her heart racing. Her stomach seemed to be dancing at the top of her throat. She gripped the chrome armrests of her airline seat tightly—so tightly that her hands were going numb.

This could very possibly be a dream,
she thought.

Somewhere in the last three hours, Gaia Moore had begun a new life.

The 747 jumbo jet made a slow, sweeping turn on the runway. Gaia actually considered pinching herself—but ruled it out as being too much of a cliché. No, if she was going to pinch someone for a reality check, it would be the man sitting next to her in the window seat. . . decked out in his thick black overcoat, Armani suit, and slicked-back hair. He was like a vision from some film noir. He was too good to be true.

Uncle Oliver,
she thought, savoring each syllable. Looking at him—her blood relative, her family—she
tried once again to accept the notion of good fortune, of things going right for a change. Thinking this way wasn't her strong suit. Humongous waves of optimism were totally alien to her. All this newfound love in her life was almost making her queasy. Like an overload of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. She was on a sugar high— but a
pleasant
one. A wonderful one.

The only possible crimp in her euphoria was the fact that she was leaving Sam Moon behind. But that was only temporary.
Yes, there was a sort of twisted irony involved in loving someone for so long from afar—and being separated literally at the moment of connection . . .
but he would wait for her.

Wouldn't he?

Of course he would. He had to wait.

Anyway, what mattered most—
all
that mattered, really—was that her uncle had kept his promise: a promise he'd made to her the first night he ever spoke to her, the night those sick thugs had almost killed Sam Moon and then almost killed her. Had he been even a moment later, Gaia's throat would have been slit from ear to ear. But he had appeared out of nowhere—a white knight out of the shadows of Washington Square Park—and he'd taken down that knife-wielding bastard with one perfect shot.

Gaia was barely conscious by then, but she could still hear her uncle's words. Kneeling close to her,
keeping her safe, he'd made his solemn promise: “I'll come back for you,” he said. “I swear it.”

And here he was, right beside her.

That a family member would keep a promise to Gaia was a totally novel idea. But it was one she could see herself getting used to. And she was ready to repay the favor. She knew Uncle Oliver was very sick— stricken with a resurgence of cancer that was now attacking his pancreas. But there were doctors in Germany who could help him. And Gaia believed in her heart that even if his indomitable strength and those specialists' treatments weren't enough to cure him, love and gratitude would do the trick.

Because if there's one thing Gaia had learned in the five years that her body and soul had taken a beating (and one thing that she
never
would have admitted under even the most severe torture), it was this: No one—no person or animal or creature of any kind— could truly live without some kind of family.
One could survive, yes.
Gaia had proved that time and time again. But truly living was impossible.

And that's just what Gaia was going to make damn sure her uncle did.

Live.

The engines of the 747 began to rumble, whirring at an increasing pitch as the plane cruised down the runway. Gaia watched as the yellow markers on the ground passed by the oval window one by one, blurring into a
solid strip of neon lightning. Adrenaline poured through her veins. She felt the jet's wheels spinning beneath her, poised to float off the ground at any second.

Without even thinking, Gaia reached for Oliver's hand, clasping her fingers with his. He turned to her. A warm smile spread across his rugged, shaded face, the familial connection seeming almost electric, as if their common blood were joining at the fingertips.

And then she realized that she'd spent so much time listening to her own thoughts, she hadn't even said a word to her uncle since they'd boarded the plane.

“I can't believe this,” she murmured. “I can't believe we're really—”

“Shhh.” Her uncle squeezed her hand firmly, raising his index finger to his lips to silence her. He raised his head slightly over his seat and scanned the front and back of the passenger area. Gaia couldn't help but notice the tension in his grip, the unsettled look in his eye. And she remembered one very important fact— something she'd managed to forget in all her disorienting excitement:
She and Uncle Oliver were on the lam.
Technically Gaia was still a minor and still under the care of the Niven family—so legally speaking, she was actually being
kidnapped.
It was almost funny. Oliver was obviously surveying the plane to make sure that nobody had followed them....

The Niven family.

Yeah. Some family. She shifted in her seat. Harsh
memories began to stomp all over her familial buzz, like giant footsteps—trampling down on her just as the nose of the plane lifted into the white winter sky. There was George Niven, the hapless absentee parent . . .

And then there was Ella.

Ella. Once known simply as her “stepmonster.” The woman who'd hated Gaia so much, she'd actually put a professional hit out on her.
Gaia couldn't think of her former foster mother without a bewildering rush of emotion.
The events were still too recent, too painful. First Ella was an air-headed bitch. Then she was a murderous spy. And then she was just a very sad figure who'd traded her own life for Gaia's. Somehow, in the last hours of Ella's wasted life, all of Gaia's feelings for her had shifted. She'd realized that Ella was really a victim much like herself....

Another tragic victim of Gaia's father.

In the end, though, Ella was the one person who'd actually had the guts and decency to tell Gaia the truth about the man—that he was a dark-hearted sadist who'd named himself for the satanic Norse god of the underworld:
Loki.
Nausea tore through Gaia's stomach. Loki had made Ella's life a living hell right up until her death.
But that was a far cry from his worst crime.
Yes . . . because Loki was also the man that had killed Gaia's mother.

My father killed my mother.

The sentence echoed through Gaia's head again. She had
done everything in her power to keep that horrific mantra out of her mind, but it was impossible. Whenever she let it in for a moment, it would haunt her for hours at a time—