The Mephisto Kiss (The Redemption Of Kyros)

  EGMONT

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  First published by Egmont USA, 2012

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Trinity Faegen, 2012

  All rights reserved

  www.egmontusa.com

  www.trinityfaegen.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Faegen, Trinity

  The Mephisto kiss: the redemption of Kyros / Trinity Faegen.

  p. cm. – (The Mephisto covenant; bk. 2)

  Summary: Sasha, a descendant of Eve, and Jax, a son of Hell, must try to stop Eryx from using the President’s daughter, also a daughter of Eve, to take over the country.

  eISBN: 978-1-60684-379-6

  [1. Good and evil–Fiction. 2. Christian life–Fiction. 3. Supernatural–Fiction. 4. Love–Fiction. 5. Presidents–Family–Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F132Mep 2012

  [Fic]–dc23

  2012004025

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  v3.1

  For Mike.

  I love you more than John Lennon loved guitars.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  “I AM PART OF THE PART THAT ONCE WAS EVERYTHING,

  PART OF THE DARKNESS WHICH GAVE BIRTH TO LIGHT …”

  —MEPHISTOPHELES, FROM GOETHE’S FAUST

  ONE

  KISSING MATTHEW WAS ONE OF JORDAN’S FAVORITE THINGS to do, but tonight was different. Instead of enjoying the feel of his arms around her and the slow, gentle slide of his mouth over hers, all she could think about was the argument she’d had with her father before she came to Matthew’s house.

  In the middle of the kiss, she sighed, and he pulled back a little, gazing at her from soft brown eyes. “It’s not something you could have prevented. You didn’t even see the e-mail until … after. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

  “It’s not that. Not entirely, anyway. It’s Dad. After the news hit about that girl’s suicide, he told me I have to quit doing the TV spots for STOP, that I can’t be their spokesperson anymore, and we got in an epic fight about it. Why does everything I do have to be about him?”

  With long, warm fingers, Matthew smoothed the hair at her temples. “Well, he is the president, and you’ve said yourself that your family lives in a fishbowl. STOP is a great thing, but every time it doesn’t work, the newspeople make a big deal about your involvement. As long as you’re part of it, they’re going to focus on you instead of the kids it’s supposed to help.”

  Pulling away from him, she sat up on the sofa. Across the room, the closing credits of the movie they’d just watched rolled across the screen. “When I turned seventeen, Dad asked me to do some of the things a First Lady does, since Mom’s gone. I had lessons about how to greet state visitors and which fork to use and how to talk to reporters. Dad’s press secretary wanted me to get involved with breast cancer awareness, since that’s how Mom died, but I wanted to work with STOP, because of Holly.” Volunteering to do public-service announcements for the Suicidal Teens Outreach Program had been her way of dealing with her friend’s death, and now Dad was telling her she had to quit. It felt like a betrayal of Holly’s memory.

  “Maybe it’s not a bad idea to step back. Those e-mails eat you up, and since you aren’t allowed to respond to any of them, it just frustrates you and makes you depressed.”

  He had a point. She’d had notes from kids that sliced her soul to ribbons. Some managed to work through their problems, but some didn’t. Like the girl who e-mailed Jordan in the middle of last night and said she was all done, that she was giving up. By the time Jordan saw it, the girl was dead from an overdose of sleeping pills.

  As the First Daughter, she received hundreds, sometimes thousands of e-mails every week. It was White House policy that each e-mail receive a reply, and most were a generic response sent by Carla, the press secretary’s assistant, or one of several staffers who worked under her, but they always flagged the e-mails they felt needed a personal reply from Jordan. Since Jordan had become the public face of STOP, she also received e-mails from desperate teens, and those received a reply expressing concern and compassion, along with the phone number and e-mail address for STOP. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to respond personally; she wasn’t allowed. The press secretary was adamant about it, because of who she was. If she counseled someone who still killed himself, it would be a PR disaster for Dad. Everything was always about the presidency. Most of the time, she didn’t mind, but sometimes it really got to her. “I told Dad that the news will call me a quitter, and it’ll look worse.”

  “And what did he say?”

  She turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder. “He said it wouldn’t be the worst thing said about him.” Sucking in a deep breath, she let it out slowly. “It’s so bad, Matthew, like everything Dad does is wrong. He said every bill he signs to fix a problem seems to create another one. Unemployment is higher than it’s ever been. His approval rating is almost as low as Nixon’s the day he resigned from office.”

  “My dad says he listened to the wrong people and took bad advice.”

  Just that morning, she’d noticed Dad looked really old. “After Mom died, he shouldn’t have run for a second term, but he did, and now it’s all wrong.”

  Matthew rubbed her back. “Come on, Jordan, don’t be so down. Let’s do something that’ll take your mind off of all the negative.”

  “Like what?”

  “We could go upstairs to my room.”

  “Are you serious?” She turned her head again and saw the look in his ordinarily calm eyes. “Oh, wow, you are serious! Geez, Matthew, way to be inappropriate. I’m supersad and bummed out, and you’re saying we should have sex?”

  “It’s not like we haven’t been going out forever, so why not tonight? It’d be something to remember from this day that isn’t a bummer.”

  She turned away and tucked her hair behind her ears. “I just got through telling you what a bad place my dad is in. Can you imagine if I got pregnant? It’d kill him.” She sighed again. “Not to mention the field day the newspeople would have with that.”

  “You won’t get pregnant.”

  “Says you. Nothing’s for sure, and it’s not a risk I want to take.” She focused on the movie credits and waited for Matthew to tell her she needed to stop running everything she did through the filter of living in the White House. Other than going off about Auburn football, it was his favorite lecture.

  Instead, he asked, almost in a whisper, “Do you love me?”

  Ohmigod, he dropped the L word. Out of nowhere, when she least expected it. Her friend, Tessa, said he’d do it eventually, that it was every g
uy’s last-ditch effort to get a girl to say yes. Jordan told her Matthew wasn’t like that. Sure he asked—he was a seventeen-year-old guy, after all—but she always said no, rolled out some variation of the Speech, he gave her the Lecture, and they moved on. Rinse and repeat.

  Now he changed everything by asking if she loved him. Inwardly cringing, she held the do-you-love-me grenade gingerly while she debated what to say. What if she said yes, and he didn’t say he loved her, too? It would be out there, with no way to take it back. She’d die of humiliation.

  But what if she said she wasn’t sure, and he broke up with her? She wasn’t ready for life without Matthew. Other than Tessa, he was her best friend, and yes, she did love him, but not necessarily like that. Not enough to sleep with him.

  The credits came to an end, and the menu screen popped up. Turning to look at Matthew, she lobbed the grenade back at him. “Do you love me?”

  He reached for her arm and tugged until she was back against his side. “I’ve never known a girl like you, Jordan. You think the only reason everybody likes you is because your dad’s the president, but it would be the same if he was a garbageman. It’s not him. It’s you, and whatever’s inside you that makes everybody want to hang with you.” He pulled her closer and kissed her forehead. “It’s part of the reason I keep asking about sex, because it’d make me feel more sure about us, that you’d be less likely to bail on me.”

  Lifting her face, she met his eyes. “You worry that I’ll break up? Seriously?”

  His arms tightened. “All the time.” Sincerity was all over his face, and his smile was crooked, like he was embarrassed. “I love you, Jordan.”

  She almost couldn’t breathe. This was romantic. This was awesome. Pressing a kiss to his soft mouth, she was about to whisper, “I love you, back,” but didn’t get it out before there were two loud pops from the street, just outside the window, making her jump. “Somebody has firecrackers.”

  Looking completely freaked out, Matthew grabbed her hand while he shoved away from the back of the sofa. “Those wern’t firecrackers.”

  A loud crash came from the front hall, and she whipped her head around just as the door flew open. Two men in ski masks rushed inside, each with an arm extended, holding a handgun.

  Matthew was already lunging from the sofa, pulling her along as he booked it toward the kitchen. In those few seconds, all she could think was, Where is the Secret Service? There were two agents, one in front of Matthew’s house, one in back, and they were constantly in contact with police patrolling the area, so help had to be on the way already. But why weren’t the agents inside? Had these guys shot Maggie out there on the front steps? Where was Paul? He had to have heard the shots. He should be coming inside, right now, but as they cleared the swinging door into the kitchen from the den, there was no one.

  Matthew was headed for the back door. An alley ran behind the row of town houses, and once they were outside, in the dark, they could run and find somewhere to hide until—

  Her heart skipped a beat when she heard another gunshot.

  It broke into pieces when Matthew stumbled and let go of her hand.

  Snipping the last of the wayward tendrils from an ornamental orange tree, Key stepped back and surveyed his work. “Why won’t you bloom? It’s time. You need to give it up. The bees are hungry.”

  The tree stood there in the dark, small and silent.

  His gaze moved across the lush interior of the greenhouse while he inhaled deeply of the warm, moist air, heavy with the scent of vegetation and rich earth. The greenhouse smelled like life. Situated in the rambling garden to the east of the house on the Mephisto Mountain, all but buried in late December snow, everything within the walls of glass and steel depended on him for survival, right down to the earthworms. His care was rewarded with a slight easing of never-ending restlessness.

  Sometimes, when the sun shone through the glass at just the right angle, when the blue of the sky above reflected against the tiny waterfall in the middle of the south wall, he could almost forget what he was, what he did, and imagine happiness.

  But those times were rare.

  Tilting his head, he looked up at the bowl of stars suspended above the greenhouse and wished God could hear him.

  Jax’s voice on the intercom above the greenhouse door cut through the perfect silence. “We have a situation. War room in one minute.”

  Damn.

  With a heavy sigh, Key walked toward the door, setting his green shears on the potting bench before he disappeared. A few seconds later, he stood in the room at the center of a maze of computer banks and offices housed in the basement of the Mephisto mansion. One wall of the war room held an enormous plasma screen; on another was a gigantic map of the world and a whiteboard, and the center of the stone floor was dominated by an ancient oval table, three identical chairs on either side, and a new, smaller one at the end.

  His brothers were all there, in varying states of dress. Key noticed that Sasha, the latest addition to the Mephisto, wore one of Jax’s dress shirts, her long, slender legs ending in a pair of white socks. She had her blonde hair up in a ponytail that somehow made her more beautiful than if she’d had it all fixed and perfect. He wished he had a girl who’d wear his dress shirts as pajamas.

  He focused on Jax. “What’s going on?”

  Jax picked up the remote control from the table. “This was recorded about an hour ago.” The plasma screen was filled with an image of the president and his daughter, standing side by side on the steps of the White House, greeting the King and Queen of Sweden. The scene changed, and Jordan Ellis was handing out Easter baskets to a gaggle of little kids. Key watched impassively, but he definitely noticed she was beautiful. Small, barely over five feet, with long dark hair and wide blue eyes, when she smiled, her lovely face lit up, and her eyes … he’d swear they twinkled. He enjoyed watching her, but began to wonder how the hell photo ops of the First Daughter warranted a Mephisto situation.

  The voiceover reporter said, “No one has claimed responsibility, no ransom demand has been issued, but an inside source tells CNN the FBI and Homeland Security believe the two gunmen are Americans. Several militias are being questioned, particularly a group based in Texas known as Red Out.”

  Key felt sick. “Did the bastards kidnap her?”

  From where he leaned against the map wall, Phoenix said, “They took out her Secret Service detail, broke into her boyfriend’s house, shot the boyfriend, and stole the girl.”

  “No way. Maybe somebody could take out a couple of Secret Service agents, but they couldn’t take the president’s daughter farther than a few blocks before they’d have every cop and uniformed Secret Service agent in the city all over them.”

  “Just keep watching,” Phoenix said.

  The screen changed to a scene outside a Capitol Hill row house, yellow crime-scene tape blocking part of the sidewalk. Scores of people stood watching as medics rolled a gurney through the front door and into a waiting ambulance. The voiceover reporter said, “Matthew Whittaker, seventeen-year-old son of Senator Jim Whittaker of Alabama, is in critical condition at George Washington University Hospital. He remains unconscious, but FBI agents hope to question him when he wakes.”

  Jax fast-forwarded, then stopped when the White House press secretary was speaking. Various White House staffers stood just behind him.

  “Two men affiliated with the Red Out militia in central Texas were arrested after law enforcement pursued the car seen speeding away from the Whittaker residence. Miss Ellis was not in the car. The Secret Service believes the car was a decoy and the president’s daughter was taken by alternate means.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Key stared at the guy second to the left. “The guy second to the left is way too still. He looks like a statue.”

  “He’s Ron Trent, the chief of staff,” Jax said. “It wouldn’t be so obvious if every other staffer wasn’t fidgeting, or crying.”

  They knew the Skia by the dark shadow across their eyes
, but it never showed up on TV. They had to see a face in person to know if he’d given his soul to Eryx. But there were other signs, especially with the newest Skia. It took a lot of practice to act like a human with a soul, to fashion a facial expression to fit the situation, whether happy, sad, or frightened. In a row of hyperemotional people, Ron Trent was completely impassive, not an ounce of feeling on his face or in his eyes. “Did someone check him out? Is he Skia?”

  Phoenix said, “I did, and he is. Then I called M, who found out Eryx turned the guy about six months ago.”

  Key instantly began to consider the difficulty of taking out the White House chief of staff. Ron Trent was a high-profile guy, closest adviser to the president. “What are you thinking, Phoenix? How can we do this?”

  Jax and Sasha exchanged a look before they both turned to Key. “Taking out Trent is definitely something we need to do, but that isn’t the situation.”

  Looking around the room at the faces of his brothers, he realized they all knew something he didn’t. “Okay, then, what is the situation?”

  “Eryx is behind the kidnapping,” Jax said. “That’s how Jordan disappeared. We think he staged the break-in for show, because, just like us, he can’t screw too much with reality. He had those guys, who’re bound to be lost souls, give the cops a good chase, and in the meantime, he transported her somewhere he can keep her until Ron Trent coerces an oath from the president. To keep that from happening, we need to find her.”

  Key looked around at each face, hoping to see somebody break. This had to be a joke, a prank they cooked up just to screw with him. But no, he could see from their expressions that they were dead serious. “Have you all lost your minds? We can’t interfere with free will. If the president caves, there’s nothing we can do about it. It’ll be dicey to take him down, but it won’t be the first time we took out a head of state. Eryx has tried to take over governments before.”

  “Not exactly free will,” Ty said from the opposite corner, one of his wolfhounds sitting next to him. “The man’s daughter, the only family he has since his wife died, is in danger of being killed unless the president agrees to pledge his soul to Eryx.”