Read Online Final Solstice by David Sakmyster - Free Book Online

ready?”
    Gabriel’s eyes sparkled as he nodded.
    “You have chosen a suitable target?” Solomon slipped into the robe, and as Annabelle backed away, head down, he tied the belt and then put his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder in a fatherly gesture. “I know the burden I’ve placed on you, but you are ready, and it is your decision to make, Adept.”
    His face turned up, caught in the sunlight streaming in the great windows over Solomon’s shoulder, Gabriel squinted, and a smile came to his face. “I’ve chosen carefully. As you’ve instructed, somewhere tropical, with … a significant coastal population.”
    Solomon waved his hand. “You can tell me when you and Annabelle get there.”
    The girl’s eyes raised, a smile appeared and Gabriel knew she had been hoping for this chance, to be given this assignment and to go along with Gabriel. Solomon was indeed generous and gracious to his favored servants.
    “You’re not coming with us?”
    “No,” Solomon said gently. “I will be leading … other areas and coordinating other efforts, and then heading to a most important meeting. You however, have been entrusted with the most intense spectacle, and I assume you’ve assembled the adepts you require?”
    Gabriel nodded. “They’re standing by. Five of them there already, just waiting for instructions.”
    “Then let’s not keep them—or the world—waiting.”

Book 2

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