Rebecca York - Prince of Time

Dear Reader,

Pack your bags and join our heroine Cassandra Devereaux on a thrilling adventure to Alaska where she discovers Thorn—one of the most unusual heroes we’ve ever created. We also had a great time doing the research for Prince of Time . Ruth and her husband found the perfect setting for the book while on a trip to Alaska. And a scene in the story reflects her impressions of the flights she took with several bush pilots. Eileen’s investigations yielded fascinating facts on the origins of language.

And while working on our villain’s motivation, we both had the opportunity to take a closer look at some of the strange and scary predictions being made in conjunction with the approaching millennium.

Prince of Time is the twelfth 43 Light Street book. Lucky thirteen in the series will be a super release from Harlequin in 1996. It will feature Detective Mike Lancer, Jo O’Malley’s new partner, in a psychological thriller with a serious “identity crisis.” After that, we’ll be writing two more Light Street novels for Intrigue.

All our best chills and thrills,

Ruth Glick and Eileen Buckholtz

Aka Rebecca York

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cassandra Devereaux—On an expedition to Alaska, she met the man of her dreams.

Thorn—He was a stranger in a strange land. And his time was running out.

Jacques Montague—Collecting artifacts was his passion. Amassing power, his obsession.

Marie Pindel—Where did her loyalty lie?

Lodar—He took revenge on anyone who got in his way.

Zeke Chamers—Had he stumbled on the find of the century or a clever fake?

Feydor Lenov—The Russian followed orders—for a price.

Victor Kirkland—The State Department official was playing two operations close to his vest.

Marissa Devereaux—She’d do anything to save her sister.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

One moment she was exhilarated, excited, trembling on the brink of discovery. In the next, an ominous rumble on the mountain far above her told Cassandra Devereaux she was going to die.

Glen Fielding, her Alaskan guide, was already running.

Early this morning he’d landed his float plane on a clear blue lake a hundred miles northwest of Denali National Park. And Cassie had been awed by the rugged peaks and endless green of the Douglas firs as she and Glen paddled his canoe to shore and hiked a couple of miles through the wilderness to this remote slope.

Glen was twenty feet below her and on the right, but it was already too late for either of them to escape.

Cassandra screamed as several tons of last winter’s snow came rumbling down the mountain like a glacier broken loose from its moorings. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not in summer.

She gasped Glen’s name as he disappeared under a blanket of white. Lumps of ice pelted her head and shoulders before she ducked under the shelter of a protective ledge. The mountain shook like a fortress under aerial bombardment, and she waited for the tumbling snow and boulders to sweep her away.

As suddenly as the avalanche had started, it stopped, leaving Cassie crouched in eerie silence. Cautiously, she moved her arms and legs. The worst pain she detected was in her right arm, but it was bearable.

“Glen? Glen?”

He didn’t answer.

She tried to struggle forward, tried to get to the spot where he’d disappeared. But she was trapped by a solid wall of white.

A choking sensation clogged Cassie’s throat. Ignoring it, she found her pack under a rock and scrabbled through the contents, cursing when she remembered that Glen had taken the trench shovel. Grimly, she set a flashlight on a pile of snow and started digging. But after a few minutes, her fingers stiff from the cold, she could see that her efforts only brought more snow down on her head.

Breathing hard, she snatched up the light and searched the pack again, looking for the two-way radio. The case was broken. When she twisted the dials, there wasn’t even a crackle of static.

Cassie hugged her shoulders and leaned back against the rock wall of her prison. At least she was alive, she told herself. For now.

But what about Glen, she wondered with a stab of guilt. She had a pilot’s license. She could have flown here herself. But she’d wanted to look like nothing more than a travel agent, so she’d paid well for Glen’s services. She hadn’t told him she was on a highly classified assignment from the government. Instead she’d used the cover story she and her sister, Marissa, found so convenient—that they specialized in scouting out adventure locales. And she’d been hired by a millionaire sportsman in the lower forty-eight who wanted to climb a mountain nobody else had tackled.

As she and Glen had approached the Alaskan range, her special instruments had confirmed that there was something strange on the east slope of one of the peaks.

“Never taken anyone here before,” her guide had remarked as he set the plane down on the water with a gentle touch.

“That’s what my client wants,” Cassie had replied cheerfully, trying to mask the excitement in her voice. This expedition was important to her, more important than she was willing to admit.

Now look what she’d gotten herself into, she thought as she fought panic. Nobody knew where she was. No one was going to come rescue her the way Jed Prentiss had saved her sister a few months ago. With a fleeting smile, she thought about Jed and Marci, taking comfort from the knowledge that her sister was well and happy. At least one of the Devereaux sisters had escaped the ravages of their childhood.

But that childhood had also made them both fighters. And Cassie wasn’t going to give up so easily. Pulling out her flashlight, she started inching along the ledge, squeezing around a boulder that had crashed against the rock. Behind it was a large indentation and, on the ground, shards of what might have been basalt. Only they looked too jagged.

Cassie picked one up, running her thumb cautiously along the edge. It felt more like plastic than stone. Turning, she realized that light emanated from the hole the boulder had made. When she shouldered the cracked surface, it gave with a groaning sound, and she stumbled through—into some sort of manmade corridor. The walls were cold metal, but they radiated a gentle amber glow like an old computer screen.

Dear heaven! It looked as if the boulder had crashed into an escape hatch for a secret military post. The irony made her laugh, the sound echoing hollowly off the tunnel walls. So much for the FCC’s little mystery! They were going to be angry about spending the money to send her up here.

Cassandra expected to hear alarms ring and see guards with machine guns. But there was no intruder alert, only the insistent hum of equipment deep in the earth.

“Anybody home?”

Only the hollow echo of her own voice answered. Maybe this was an automated facility. Replacing her flashlight in her pack, she crept forward, aware that the humming was getting louder as she descended into the mountain. Several feet ahead of her, the passage was dark. But as she moved forward, the glow kept pace, imparting an eerie sense of being ushered onward.