Paladin Prophecy 2: Alliance Read Online Free Page A

the Center—and the attractions of Hugh’s great family legacy—so suddenly? If I have the timing right, that would have been after they’d known Carol was pregnant but before I was born. Was their flight from the Center related to their finding out about that in some way, and if so, how?
    Biology had been Hugh Greenwood’s subject at the Center, and he was well liked by his students. A trained medical doctor, with a couple of related PhDs, his father’s later work as a researcher in neurobiology clearly had its foundation in his earlier life. But did he do it just to make a living, or was there something more to it?
    Remember, when the Black Caps not only kidnapped my parents but also when they found us in Ojai, they broke into my father’s lab and stole all of his research.
    What was Hugh Greenwood working on that scared the Caps into taking so big a risk? And what had Hobbes and his people done with them since?
    Two weeks after the plane crash, federal officials claimed they’d identified the bodies in the wreck as those of Will’s parents. Will knew better than to believe them because a few days after the crash he’d received a painfully hopeful text message from his missing, and presumed dead, father. And because of a coded message inside it, Will never doubted that Jordan West had written it. He felt less hopeful about his mother’s survival, especially after he’d seen her infected with a Ride Along, the mind-control monster that was one of the Other Team’s most hideous weapons. His mother might be gone, and he’d come to grips with that over the last few months.
    But he believed one hundred percent that his father was alive, and that belief alone kept him going. Will had never breathed a word to his roommates about this devastating truth. He was afraid of the many unknowns that might come back to hurt them when they’d been through too much trying to help him already. He couldn’t blame them if, just as he had, his roommates had decided to push all this insanity into the background, concentrate on their schooling, go along with the Center’s explanation that the worst was behind them, and hope like hell it was true.
    But with Will’s reawakened attitude, he knew better: TROUBLE’S COMING BACK WITH A VENGEANCE, BECAUSE THIS TIME I’M TAKING THE FIGHT TO THEM.
    He’d start slowly, with Ajay. They’d follow up on their earlier investigations and then formulate a strategy on how to proceed.
    And that’s how things went, until 9:14 p.m. on June 3, the last day of their sophomore year.

JUNE
    After his last final exam of the year, Will returned to Pod G4-3 in Greenwood Hall, tossed his backpack aside, and was about to enter his bedroom when he spotted a letter, addressed to him, propped up on the dining room table. Hardly an everyday occurrence these days. Postmarked five days earlier, from a handwritten return address in Palm Desert, California, below the name N. DEANGELO.
    Will took it into his room, propped up his school notebook, and sat at his desk. His syn-app appeared on the screen of the device, watching curiously as Will opened the envelope and unfolded a single-page letter written in the same neat, feminine hand as the address:
    Dear Will West,
    I must apologize for how long it has taken me to respond to your letter of last November. You see it was sent to my former address in Santa Monica, where I haven’t lived in over twelve years, and I’ve moved twice since then. It’s only through the admirable persistence of our much-maligned postal service that it finally reached me two weeks ago.
    Will flashed back to the letter he’d written last November to a Santa Monica address that Nando had helped him find. But that was to a woman named Nancy Hughes, a navy nurse who Dave had told him he’d known in Vietnam just before he died.
    Your letter certainly got me thinking. I’m at an age now, recently retired, where you spend a lot of time remembering things. I thought the best way to answer