Page 122 of He Who Sleeps

She nodded again, looking to Easton and Carter. “I don’t think I want to go alone.”

"I'll come with you," Carter offered. "I have to speak to the priests still about options for therapy," Easton told her. "But depending how quickly that goes, I might be able to come with you, too."

“Okay...but if not, that’s good. We can talk when we get back, yeah?”

Kildare looked to her. “If you find what I hope you are going to find, bring them back,” he said softly to her. “We can’t function as two separate entities, He and Gaia wouldn’t have wanted that. And you, you have the bloodline to do it.”

She nodded. “I...yes, I’ll try.”

He walked after the guys then, Easton following, leaving her and Carter in the room alone. Smiling to her lover, she took his hand. “Come on...let’s go and solve this mystery.”

Chapter 44

Turning onto the driveup to the place she spent her formative years, tension filled her being. The entire trip back over the ocean wasn’t like this, it had been more relaxed, snuggling with Carter in the cabin of the plane, she had napped, and they had talked, though it wasn’t anything super important. Brutus had stayed back at the compound in the Balkans, and Emerson had promised to keep him fed and safe ‘til they returned.

When they had touched down in Ohio, they had climbed into the Range Rover that had been waiting for them, and driven the forty minutes to the little town she grew up in. Little, if anything had changed there, though she knew that she still got the alumni email from the high school there.

“Whatever we find here, I’m going to have to say something to my friends,” she said softly as they winded through the trees toward the large house at least half a mile away still.

"I'm sure they'd understand," Carter said. "Finding that they belong to The Order might feel like belonging to a family after all this time."

“More like they are going to want their own Order boys,” she said with a wry smile. “You think Easton is going to be okay?”

"He'll be fine. He's just really excited about being able to be physically intimate. It's softened the blow of the rest of it a little bit. Although I think if he could raise those fuckers from the dead and skin them all over again, he totally would."

If she was honest, she was extremely excited about any kind of connection with her Snake. “I would be right there with him,” she said solemnly. They crested the hill and she saw the large house looming ahead of them. It had always looked to her like this large imposing façade, a place rife with secrets and history. Now she knew the secrets were real but they had nothing to do with the building. It had everything to do with the women therein.

“Still looks the same,” she said as they parked on the far side of the circular drive. The building was black brick, with deep wood accents, two turrets reaching to the sky, the wraparound porch dusted with the snow that had only fell last night. “Though it’s quieter than it used to be.”

"Makes sense if the whole purpose of them being here was to hide your bloodline," Carter pointed out. "Now that you're out in the world they can age out the rest and close up if they want."

“Well, they need to answer for a lot of things,” she said. “Come on.”

They walked up the stairs and opened the door, stepping into the foyer of the large house. It was largely the same, right as well as a bunch of bouquets of flowers all over the place.

“Can I help you?” they heard from their left, and turned to see a woman she didn’t know standing there. She was older, dressed in a green wrap dress, shoes with kitten heels, her salt and pepper hair in a bun, and she wore sparse makeup.