3. AN UNEXPECTED CALL
LEESA AND RAVE WALKED back up the entrance drive of Black Pond Park. Halfway up the hill, her phone buzzed. She didn’t know why, but a sense of impending trouble stole over her as she unzipped her small fanny pack and grabbed the cell. She automatically stepped away from Rave, taking no chances his energy would zap her phone. He grinned at her in understanding. Max just looked on curiously.
The screen showed the call was from an unknown caller. Leesa breathed a bit easier. At least the call wasn’t from her mom or her brother. Still, she could not shake the feeling that this call meant trouble.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this Leesa Nyland?” asked an unfamiliar male voice on the other end.
“Yes, it is.”
“The Leesa Nyland who was born eighteen years ago in Springfield, New Jersey?”
The alarm bells in Leesa’s head really started clanging now. What was this all about? Her fingers began twirling in hair.
“Yeah, that’s me,” she said cautiously. “Who is this, please?”
Leesa thought she heard a sigh of relief through the phone.
“Leesa, you don’t know how glad I am to hear your voice. I’ve been trying to find you for quite some time. Where do you live now?”
Leesa wasn’t sure she should answer that. The caller still had not identified himself. She glanced at Rave and saw he was watching her intently, a concerned look on his face. With his volkaane hearing, she knew he had probably heard every word the guy had spoken.
“Who is this?” she asked again, more forcefully this time.
Never in a million years would she have guessed the words she heard next.
“It’s your father, Leesa.”
Leesa’s jaw dropped. Was it possible? Her father had abandoned her family when she was only seven years old. She had not heard from or of him since. Her fingers danced more rapidly in her hair.
“Dad?”
There was a brief hesitation before the man answered. “No, not him, Leesa. This is your true father.”
The phone slipped from Leesa’s suddenly lifeless fingers. Max barked once as Rave instinctively reached out to catch it. With his speed, he could have caught it easily, but at the last second he pulled his hand back. If he touched the phone, its circuits would be fried, so he let it crash to the pavement. At least there was a chance the phone would survive the fall. It banged onto the asphalt and bounced into a small puddle beside the driveway.
Leesa bent to pick up it up. She felt like she was moving in slow motion, as if the air had magically developed the viscosity of water. Finally, her fingers closed around the phone and she picked it up. A narrow crack zigzagged through the plastic casing. She wiped the phone on her sweatshirt and then held it to her ear. The cell phone was dead.
Her knees began to feel weak and her head felt like it was spinning. She might have collapsed, but Rave had already enfolded her in his arms. She buried her head against his chest, unsure what to think or do. She barely felt Max rubbing his furry body against the back of her legs.
The man on the other end of the call was named Dominic, though he could not remember the last time anyone had called him that. He stared at the now silent phone in his hand and cursed himself. He should have been less abrupt with his message, should have told her to prepare herself for some shocking news, and to please listen to what he had to say. Instead, he’d been so excited he had bulled ahead with no finesse and taken her by complete surprise, telling her the man she thought was her father was not really her dad, and that he, Dominic, was her true father. That was correct in some ways, in others it was not. She would have difficulty understanding even if he was standing right in front of her trying to explain it—how could he have expected her to comprehend it through an unexpected phone call? He hadn’t even gotten the chance to tell her his name. He had heard a noise before the connection was broken, but he didn’t know if Leesa had simply hung up on him or if something had happened to her.
He slammed the phone down into its cradle, then looked quickly around to see if anyone had noticed his outburst. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself. Dominic was tall and slender, with dark hair speckled with gray that hung fashionably over the collar of a black polo shirt. His neatly trimmed goatee was slightly lighter in color than his hair and came to a sharp point beneath his chin. He appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties, but he was older than that—far, far older.
He stood in the lobby of the Springfield Public Library, in front of a bank of three pay phones. It was getting more and more difficult to find working public phones these days, but Dominic had no choice. To say he was “off the grid” would have been putting it far too mildly. He had never been on the grid in the first place. He had no permanent residence, owned no phone and no car, had never possessed a credit card or bank account, or even a driver’s license. He had no social security number and paid no taxes. As far as the ordinary world was concerned, Dominic did not exist.
His enemies knew he existed, though, and they were undoubtedly searching for him with as much diligence as he was searching for Leesa. Those enemies were deadly, and they would never quit until they found him. So Dominic needed to remain invisible, even though it compounded the difficulty in finding Leesa. At some point, he might need to risk his anonymity, but not yet. No, not yet.
He was certain his foes had no idea Leesa even existed, and he was going to do all he could to keep it that way. That was why he had disappeared before she was born, and why he stayed far away all these years, resisting the impulse even to check up on her. Staying away completely was the only way he knew to insure her safety, and her safety was more important than anyone could know. She hadn’t needed him to be around—not then.
She was going to need him now, though. He had to find her. He had been searching for her for almost a year, starting a few months before her eighteenth birthday. Things were going to start happening to her—puzzling, frightening things—that she would not understand, that she could not understand. Indeed, they may already have started happening. He needed to explain those things to her, and train her how to control them. Especially with the rise of Destiratu.
Destiratu forming at the same time Leesa turned eighteen was something he could never have expected, could never have planned for. The magical phenomenon was so rare the chance of the two events happening at the same time had never occurred to him. He was not sure exactly how Destiratu might interact with Leesa’s coming of age, but it was another complication, another thing he would have to deal with.
He had not expected finding her to be so difficult. The bond between them should have allowed him to sense her location within a hundred miles, but for some reason, he could not. He wondered if Destiratu had anything to with it, or if it was something else entirely. There was no way for him to know.
He had spent months systematically crisscrossing the country, stopping every hundred miles or so and casting his senses outward, seeking her unique vibration, the one that should have resonated with his own, but he had felt nothing. He had grown worried something might have happened to her, some stupid random accident perhaps, and maybe she was dead. At least now he knew she was alive. That was something, at least. Now all he had to do was find her.
Something was preventing his magic from connecting to her, though. Maybe he needed to be closer than he thought. There was just one problem—how do you get closer to someone when you have no idea where they are?
He inserted another bunch of coins into the phone and dialed her number again, holding his breath while it rang.
Please pick up, he implored silently. Please, please pick up.
The phone rang twice, and then went to a recorded message: “The number you are trying to reach is presently unavailable. Please try again later.”
This time, Dominic controlled his frustration and dropped the phone into its cradle more gently. He would do as the voice instructed and try again later, but not from here. Waiting was not in his nature, and there was precious little time to waste. He needed to be on the move, seeking Leesa and avoiding his enemies. The area code for her cell phone was from San Diego. He knew people often kept the same cell number when they moved, so there was no guarantee she still lived in San Diego, but it was all he had to go on. He hurried from the library and boarded a bus that would take him to the train station.
He had no way of knowing he was heading almost three thousand miles in the wrong direction, and what his mistake would cost Leesa.