Out of Sight by Stella Cameron Page A

mainly dealing with immediate financial issues while Ben oversaw all of the family’s business interests. Their youngest brother, Ethan, was a lawyer.
    The blue inside of the club enveloped them. It seemed strange not to hear live music at once. They rarely used anything canned.
    “No sign of Nat Archer yet?” Sykes said. “You know Nat. He’s joining us here for coffee.”
    Poppy half listened to Sykes. It was Liam whose expression confused her. He had relaxed and now he hovered, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again. Back in again.
    He nodded and rolled from his heels to his toes.
    Poppy frowned at him. “You okay?” she asked.
    His grin was very un-Liam-like. “Great. Just great. It just never crossed my mind, is all. I mean you never said anything one way or the other. Not either of you.”
    Sykes had switched on one of the fiber-optic globes that were in the center of each table. They all joked about how hokey the idea was but they had been a fixture for years.
    “I’ll call Ethan and tell him to get back here,” Liam said. “You’ll want us together. Huh! When I saw you running down the street like that, hand in hand… Well, it didn’t come to me right off, but you know how slow I am about some things.”
    Poppy and Sykes frowned at each other.
    “Worldly things, so they tell me.” Liam chuckled. “It never crossed my mind—you two being together. Hmm. If I’d known you were with Sykes, Poppy, I wouldn’t have worried. Is it too early for champagne?”

6
    I n the attic above J. Clive Millet, Antiques, Jude Millet passed through the curtain that separated him from the living world.
    The heaviness he felt was of the mind. Of the spirit…he laughed silently at the thought. Physically he had no weight. At last he was desperate to finish what had started three centuries earlier. Yes, he had married an Embran woman without any idea what she was. But he had just lost the only woman he had ever really loved and he wanted peace, a quiet home, children.
    He had got chaos, whispered suggestions that Mrs. Jude Millet was a witch, that she and her family were conspiring to bring down the booming merchant town of Bruges in Brussels for their own gain.
    The flight to London had been cruel on the Millets. Mrs. Jude Millet wasn’t with them, she had disappeared. But that didn’t stop the persecution that eventually chased the family to New Orleans where other paranormal families had helped them settle and establish themselves with the considerable possessions they had been fortunate enough to rescue.
    What they had not rescued was what they thought was almost within their grasp before the disastrous marriage: the angel who would lead them to the Ultimate Power, and the secret to why they had a wide spectrum of paranormal talents and even on occasion passed from life into a quiet place of contemplation that was not death, either. This had happened to Jude. He was certain he could not be the only one to experience this seemingly endless existence yet, so far, he had not been contacted by any others.
    The Embran woman had been called Astrid, or so he knew her. Somewhere, even now, she existed although he believed she was deteriorating, rotting around whatever held her shape-shifting body together. And she was blamed for bringing slow disintegration to the rest of her kind.
    That was the past, the present was for finishing at least this one task. He would do whatever he must to help his progeny find the sweet angel, the Book of the Way, which contained the master rules for their kind, and eventually the Harmony and the precious Ultimate Power it contained.
    As yet Sykes—and it was Sykes who mattered most—knew little about the Ultimate Power or the Harmony that held it.
    The greatest obstacle, those without conscience and with their own immortality at stake, were to be stopped: the Embran.
    And he, Jude, would become more involved as the Mentor. Changes were already in motion.
    An opportunity had