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.
And strangely, it had worked out.
“Are you going to go to Australia?” Josie asked.
“No.”
“Then why should I?”
“Because I can be of some use here. Whereas you’re just dead weight.”
“Hey, tell it like it is,” Josie muttered.
Kaitlin smirked. “When do I ever do anything else? But it makes sense. And Sadie is there. You’ll be okay.”
She yawned. It was past one in the morning, but she knew from experience that she wouldn’t sleep.
She got up, wandered into the kitchen, and found a bottle of white wine in the fridge.
She grabbed it, pulled the cork, and picked up two glasses, took them through and poured them both a glass of wine before settling herself down and taking a gulp.
“Two guys jumped me on the way home,” she said.
Josie blinked a couple of times, then sipped her wine. She was altogether just too...unmoved by everything. “Random?”
“No.”
“So why did they jump you and what did you do with them?”
“They were supposed to take me and hand me over to someone, but I couldn’t get any details. So, I knocked them out and left them for the police.”
Josie raised her glass in a toast. “All in a day’s work.”
“I’ll go to the station tomorrow and have a little visit with my new friends, see if I can’t get some more information. Then I’ll call Jake and give him a heads-up.”
“You could always tell him in person at the meeting.”
There was a meeting arranged in Scotland, at the Rayleigh estates, in two days’ time. It had been planned over a year ago.
If they’d failed to find any conclusive evidence of the cataclysm by this point, then they would have to decide how to move forward.
“I could if I was going. I’m not. But don’t let that stop you heading up there.”
“Not without you. But I think you should go.”
Kaitlin had considered it. She missed them so much—well, some of them—it was a constant ache in her chest. But she couldn’t face seeing the colonel, who was now helping them.
The colonel had been their chief controller when they’d believed they worked for the government.
And Kaitlin would never, ever forgive him for his part in Sam’s death.
Or Kane. While he hadn’t been directly responsible for Sam’s death, he could have helped him—perhaps the only person who could have, at that point.
Instead, he’d decided that Sam and the rest of them were a danger to his precious time machine and set out to systematically destroy them all.
And he’d nearly succeeded. Yet now they were all working together like one big, happy family.
The world was a crazy place.
Kane had been suspiciously silent over the last months; she’d heard nothing from him since she’d made it very clear she was not running off to Australia.
But she suspected his silence wouldn’t last. For some reason, Kane had a thing for her.
Hopefully, he was beginning to accept that it would never be reciprocated.
“You have to go back sometime,” Josie said, breaking into her less than happy thoughts. “They’re your family.”
She was right. Jake, their leader, Sadie, Rose, all the others. They were the only family she had. And she loved them. But even after nearly three years away, she just wasn’t ready to face them. She had such a deep pool of bitterness inside her. “I will. Just not yet.”
“You know,” Josie said, “you have to forgive yourself sometime.”
“What?” she snapped.
“You feel guilty about Sam’s death,” Josie said.
How did she even know about Sam’s death? Kaitlin certainly hadn’t told her. She had never spoken of that day with anyone, although Jake had tried to get her to open up once or twice. She’d shut him down, and he’d backed off, given her space.
She didn’t feel guilty.
She’d done what she had to do; what Sam had begged her to do. She glared at Josie.
“You had no choice.” Josie ignored the glare. “You couldn’t have saved him.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Deep down, don’t you wonder whether there was anything you could have done differently? Some way you could have put him back together. Made him whole again.”
No.
Her eyes pricked and she looked away, blinked, and gritted her teeth, but she didn’t answer.
What was there to say?
Josie was talking crap.
“You have to learn to forgive yourself, Kaitlin. Let go of your anger and stop pushing everyone away.”
Kaitlin swallowed the rest of her wine, put the glass down gently, and stood up. “I’m going to bed.”
“And you’ve got to stop running,” Josie called after her.
Josie was right.
After all, the end of the world was coming.
Soon, there would be nowhere left to run.