Stella Cameron: Out of Body

For Philip and Lynn Lloyd-Worth and Zara West

If ever a man had suffered for marrying the wrong woman, it was Jude Millet.

For three hundred years.

In the attic above J. Clive Millet, the French Quarter antique shop his family had owned since their flight first from Belgium, and then London—Jude listened appreciatively to the crack of early summer lightning, the rumble of thunder, and watched flashes of white light pierce the gloom in his cluttered bower.

Three hundred years.

He raised one corner of his mouth. Time flew when one was having fun, wasn’t that a saying he’d overheard when he broke his own rule and listened in on a conversation among those living in the here and now?

His poor descendants had suffered as a result of his birth and subsequent poor choices. Or one choice in particular: That wife of his.

The Millet family, an old and respected one, started their difficult journey from favor in Belgium, early in the eighteenth century.

Red-haired and green-eyed, without exception—almost—they were seen as close-knit and eccentric, but they were respected. Dealers in fine art of all varieties, they were sought after in Bruges society, even though they rarely accepted invitations to balls, soirees or other crowded, smelly gatherings they considered boring.

Then “The Event” occurred in the form of a robust, dark-haired, blue-eyed infant Millet, a male, and there was consternation.

They called the child Jude. And from time to time, a Millet has remarked on how similar the name Jude is to Judas.

Males in the family had forever chosen red-haired, green-eyed mates and, possibly through something a little beyond understanding, all subsequent males and females also had red-haired, green-eyed children.

And all went well.

Until the arrival of that dark-haired boy, Jude, that boy they at first suspected must be a changeling, an infant who didn’t belong to them at all. He was no changeling, but the Millets were eternally changed by his birth.

The child grew to manhood, a tall, dark, flamboyant force filled with the other, more important element that made the family different: they all had paranormal talents, some even magical.

There was no end to their mystical potential.

The dark-haired one eventually married a beguiling woman whose true nature he could not know until it was too late and, together with the rest of his kin, he was forced to flee to London. They barely eluded those who suspected Jude’s wife of causing bizarre deaths; the citizens of first Bruges, then London, wanted to punish the Millets for “witchcraft.”

That wife disappeared, but not soon enough to save her family by marriage from rejection and flight.

The Mentor, as Jude Millet became known by his descendants, moved to New Orleans in search of a way to combat the damage done by his ill-chosen wife and her kind. He considered her acts dark and hoped to find answers where dark arts are practiced.

He had discovered a great deal, but no ultimate answers.

Tonight Jude was far from peaceful. He could feel unrest seething on the lower floors of the Millet’s Royal Street shop. Not surprising since a new crisis had already begun to unfold. At last he would be called upon to guide, in secret, his twenty-first-century relatives. They were a feisty lot, exactly as he would wish them to be.

So many years had passed without incident since he and the others first arrived in New Orleans that he had come to hope they were out of all danger.

Now he knew how wrong he had been.

Jude moved from his place among the shadows and approached the veil through which he must pass to be present in the world of the living. He had always known there could be those events that would require him, within the bounds of the Millet Code, to become active again.

Like now.

After his release from life, followed by ages of observing and occasionally flying into a rage over decisions he would never have made, he must take an active role in his family’s affairs. The Mentor would return, not to take control, for that was not the Millet way, but to remind them of the responsibilities that came with their extraordinary powers.

Naturally, he would keep himself largely hidden from them. After all, he had never been seen by any member of the recent generations. He must introduce himself carefully, making sure they never as much as guessed that he was no farther away than the attic of their own shop, and certainly without presenting a “solid” form they might become attached to.

The actions they took would, as they always had, depend on their own conclusions and skills.

Even as he stood there, only a floor or so from some current Millets, there were a few family members looking for traces of him in London, and perhaps elsewhere. Jude, the Mentor, smiled at the thought. They not only questioned that he had ever existed, they probably hoped he had not! If they could prove he was a myth, then they could forget about dark-haired males being dangerous to the family.

Since there was, right now, another dark-haired male Millet, they desperately longed to debunk the old theory.

In front of him shimmered a weblike veil. He pointed a single, long forefinger in its direction and it disappeared.

Jude had learned a good deal about the enemy, the Embran as they were called, and their home deep in the earth.

Right now, and for thirty years past, a single member of the Embran tribe had been present in New Orleans, creating unspeakable horrors he had so far managed to hide.

No more.

Jude would oversee the beginning of the end for the one who had recently been brought to his attention. An informer had reported that for thirty years the renegade Embran had been in this very city without the Mentor’s knowledge. And in the past few weeks this Embran, who had grown too drunk on having his fill of earthly delights to carry out his mission, had made a mistake and revealed himself. Panicked into action, at last he had taken up the quest he was sent to the surface of the earth to accomplish, to crush the Millets and steal the power his people believed the family had over the fate of the Embrans.

There was little time now. The madness was unfolding. And Marley Millet, a young female descendent of the Mentor’s, had been placed in a position where the enemy might well use her as their route to dominance. Over centuries, the Embran had come to the earth’s surface from deep in the earth. Only one of them was allowed to come at a time and they had to fight one another to the death for the privilege. For expediency, the winner chose to manifest either as male or female—more or less. These creatures came to satisfy their greed for human pleasures. And they wreaked pain and fear without ever tasting justice.

But the Embrans’ own twisted strengths had begun to fade. Had begun to fade, in fact, after the one who had ensnared the Mentor himself into marriage and caused the Millets to flee for their lives had left earth and returned to Embran. She carried with her some element that began the systematic termination of her kind.

Embran after Embran visited earth only to return without answers or help for a dying race, then the latest member arrived. After indulging himself in the perverted human sexuality to which they were all addicted, he had been betrayed by the one whom he trusted. Now he was faced with his own destruction.

Desperate to reverse his fortunes he had set a ruthless plot in motion that, unless thwarted, would make sure young Marley did not live to an old age.