Chapter 1
Fifteen miles off the northeast coast of Jamaica, the yacht Equinox-4 languished in the hot sun, with its two passengers finally rising up from a long rest at the sound of a cell phone ringing.
Gabriel stretched and took a drink of water as he nodded into the phone and stared over the rim of his sunglasses into the pure cloudless sky. The blue stretched as far as he could see, and the blazing sun beat down on the three other yachts stretched out in a line like the advanced front of an approaching armada.
“We’re ready,” he said into the phone. “Commencing the ritual in three minutes, on your mark.” Hanging up, he let his gaze fall on the girl’s tanned, topless body and met her smile. Annabelle sat up and fixed her hair, no longer even blushing at Gabriel’s attentions.
“Can’t we linger a bit?”
“You heard me. Three minutes.” He licked his lips as she stood and stretched and reached for a white robe—one of a pair. She tossed the other one to him and then slipped into hers.
Gabriel came closer to her and tied her belt for her, looking into her tender eyes, and as always, thought of running barefoot through a lush verdant forest, hand in hand with her. Lost in the woods, but exactly where they were meant to be. They would be there again, soon.
“Rested?”
Annabelle nodded, lids closing in a pleasurable memory. “Quite.”
“No reservations?”
She blinked, and Gabriel thought he saw a flicker of something cross her eyes, but then it was gone. “None,” she whispered, as she shifted her gaze over his bare shoulder, to the coast. The resort at Montego Bay, where windsurfers congregated on the calmer waves and jet skis and sailfish raced in the shallows before snorkelers and glass bottom boats, where rum-soaked tourists gawked at this little slice of nature they’d been told not to wreck.
“Then let’s focus.”
He pulled up her hood, giving her one last smile, then slipped into his own robe. After tying his belt, he reached for the two wooden staves resting on the center table beside the pitcher of melting ice and the two empty champagne glasses, and the laptop—the screen open to a seismographic display of the ocean floor below them.
Gabriel passed her the shorter staff, the one with a thin green vine wrapped around it like a stripe on a candy cane. He took his own in one hand and flipped his hood up as he turned with Annabelle and faced the island.
He glanced at the laptop screen and committed the depth and location to his thoughts.
The shelf where the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates met and butted roughly against each other.
Gabriel raised his arms and held the staff over his head, as Annabelle shadowed his motions.
“Focus on the ley line, and feel its energy. It’s here, all about us.”
And when he opened his eyes, it was there. A shimmering aurora, a narrow band just overhead, undulating and throbbing like one of the earth’s veins—a jugular that Gabriel and his colleagues now tapped into, spearing into and sapping the lifeblood of the world …
… and channeling it.
Channeling it with a synchronized, massive and combined force …
… downward.
Gabriel expected exertion, expected to hear the pounding of his own veins in his skull, expected to be overheating in the robe, and expected to choke under the weight of this responsibility Solomon had placed firmly on his shoulders.
Maybe it was Annabelle, or the cool breeze she may have summoned up to soothe him, or maybe it was the quality and confidence of the other adepts in the adjacent yachts, but the whole enterprise went as smoothly as he could have hoped.
So much so that at first, after he had let his trembling arms down and leaned on the staff, catching his breath, he worried if they had accomplished anything at all.
But Annabelle, eyes closed, turned toward him as if seeing it herself, at one with the seaweed forest, fathoms under water: the rising surge of bubbles, the groaning of the plates, the cracking, grinding and shifting.
And the enormous force unleashed all at once.
Bubbles surged ahead of the boat, and Gabriel heard a sound like a cry of pleasure before he realized it came from his own throat.
Before he realized it, Annabelle was now holding his hand, just as the other pairs in the other yachts all stood by, admiring the sheet natural force they had just unleashed.
Like Neptune himself surging up from the depths, a mile-wide tsunami rose and ascended into a killer wave bearing down upon the hapless island.
Without warning, without remorse.
Gabriel squeezed Annabelle’s hand and licked his lips.
“It’s begun.”