Shadowlight by Lynn Viehl Read Free Book Online Page B

Jessa was willing to commit herself. Don’t get crazy about this.
    I’ve been crazy, Aphrodite wrote back. Now it’s starting to make sense.
    Jessa felt a pang of shame. Di had been through all seven levels of hell, and Jessa had no business spitting on her friend’s hopes. Your lips, God’s ears. Got to go.
    Immel8tr.
    Jessa ended the connection, switched off the power to her phone, and popped out the rechargeable battery pack and the SIM card. Vulcan had taught her to do that; anyone trying to trace their wireless communications would lose the signal.
    Who would want to find us? she’d asked him once.
    With what we can do? he wrote back. Who wouldn’t?
    In the very beginning, when Jessa had formed the private network with Aphrodite, the others they had found online had treated them and one another with guarded, suspicious reluctance. It had taken more than a year of cautious communications before they’d opened up to one another. That had been an enormous comfort to the entire group, but it had made them even more paranoid. To protect everyone, they’d agreed to remain anonymous to one another. No one used their real names, ages, addresses, or referred to any detail that might be used to identify them, even within the group.
    To Aphrodite and the others, Jessa was the founder of the Takyn, a woman they knew only as Jezebel.
    Vulcan wouldn’t have made a mistake about this prospect; the criteria for joining the Takyn were too exact. The person would have to be between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-four, adopted from a specific list of placement agencies run by the Catholic church in only a handful of cities. There would be no records of the person’s birth parents, and few official documents filed with state welfare agencies. The adoptive parents would have to be wealthy or well-to-do orthodox Catholics with no biological children of their own or other adopted children.
    Finally, the person being considered would have had to miraculously survive a fatal accident or illness, and come out of it with a very specific side effect, one they were subsequently compelled by necessity to hide from everyone in their life.
    Aphrodite had been the first Takyn Jessa had ever encountered. They’d met on a discussion board for adult adoptees seeking their biological parents, and then had begun exchanging e-mails. What Di had told her had at first enraged Jessa, but then they had begun comparing personal histories and discovering just how alike they were.
    Jessa had set up and named The Adopted Kids of Yesterday Network Web site, but it had been Aphrodite who dubbed their private group with the site’s acronym.
    We were taken from our real parents and families. We all remember bits and pieces of the rest in our nightmares. The doctors. The treatments. The pain. The goddamn tattoos. Whatever they did to us, they took away our chance of a normal life. Why not call us what we are?
    Jessa knew her friend had every right to be bitter. Aphrodite had terrible memories of what had been done to her, and when a nearly fatal illness had caused her ability to manifest, she had been forced to leave home and live in hiding. Virtually the same thing had happened to her when a brush with death had transformed what had been a pleasant, helpful ability into something much darker, uncontrollable and ultimately inescapable. Still, Jessa refused to believe as Di did that they had been used as lab rats when they were children and then simply abandoned.
    There had to be more reasons for what they were, and why they had been experimented on in the first place. If Vulcan was right and he had found another one like them, then the new member of the group might know more than they did. Every childhood memory, every ability, and even their individual theories illuminated another shadow of the past.
    She would have sat there by the fountain until dark, but the park’s sprinklers came on and the breeze rolled over the automatic sprayers, stealing some of