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epileptic seizures. Passing down through the body, the electricity hits the soft-tissue organs—heart, lungs and kidneys . . .”
    A word leapt out at her. She jumped ahead.
    “And when pregnant women are hit, either spontaneous abortion occurs, or else they carry the baby to full term but after delivery the infant dies.”
    Jac closed the laptop. Then her eyes. The idea of the miscarriage was too large and complicated to grab hold of. She didn’t know how to absorb it yet.
    She stood quickly, wanting, needing to get away from the computer. In her haste she didn’t see Malachai’s briefcase on the floor and tripped over it. It fell open and spilled its contents on the rug.
    Bending down, Jac picked up the papers, stuffing them back inside the case. Outside the wind continued to howl and the rain to fall. Each time more thunder broke, she involuntarily shuddered. She tried to tell herself that the worst was over now. Or the best. That it didn’t matter that she might have been pregnant. Dwelling on it wouldn’t resolve anything. This too shall pass, she intoned silently, repeating her mother’s oft-used phrase.
    This too shall pass.
    Jac wasn’t paying attention to the documents she put back in the briefcase until her own name jumped out at her from an envelope she was holding.
    Jac L’Etoile
    c/o Malachai Samuels
    The Phoenix Foundation
    19 West 83rd Street
    New York, NY
    The script was heavily slanted, indicating someone left-handed. In mythology being left-handed was associated with Lucifer and black magic.
    Turning the envelope over, she saw it had already been slit open. An almost surgically clean cut made with a letter opener. Like the lapis lazuli one Malachai kept on his desk at the Phoenix Foundation, she thought. But why would Malachai open a letter addressed to her?
    Jac glanced at the return address.
    Wells in Wood House, Isle of Jersey, England
    The words were engraved on the expensive, heavy stock. A memory teased her but remained elusive.
    Who was it from?
    Pulling out the single sheet of paper, she scanned the writing—not yet reading—just searching for a signature.
    Theo
    Without a last name. She hadn’t known his last name back then either. None of the patients at the Blixer Rath clinic knew each other’s surnames. The institute’s policy was to protect their patients’ privacy.
    Jac hadn’t thought about him in years, but now she recalled the strange and wonderful boy she’d met seventeen years ago. How amazing that after all this time, Theo had found her.
    It had been summer. The first time she’d seen him, Jac had been walking on one of the mountain paths when she’d turned a corner and found him sitting on the promontory that was her secret place. He was looking out over the countryside and didn’t know she was there until she stepped on a twig.
    Theo wasn’t handsome as much as striking. Tall and skinny. His sun-streaked hair was pulled back off his face in a ponytail that exaggerated his already prominent cheekbones and broad forehead. The eyes that were unabashedly examining her were a pale blue, watered down as if tears had drained them of most of their color. He had a haunted expression on his face.
    Jac had felt as if he were a magnet and she were a heap of helplessslivers of iron. She’d never before met someone she was drawn to so swiftly, and her response surprised her.
    She was fourteen, with raging hormones and an overactive imagination. Primed for a boy to come along and stir her up. Especially one who aesthetically fit her image of the young Greek heroes she read about in mythology classes.
    Jac, like so many girls her age, was not quite sure of herself. Meeting a boy, she became self-conscious and more aware than ever that she wasn’t really pretty, not in a traditional sense. Like her mother’s, her auburn hair fell around her face in Medusa-like waves. Her neck was too long. Her nose too strong. Her eyes were green, an underwater jade, not sparkling but