Uriel: The Inheritance (Airel Saga Book Five)

Chapter V

IT WAS LIKE MY life had been wrenched into reverse. I sat on the couch with Michael while my mom sat across from us in her chair, acting nervous with her hands on her thighs, and my dad stalked the living room floor like an inquisitor. What, I thought, are we suddenly Amish, and we have rules for courting now? After all that's happened, I have to ask your permission to live my own life?

"Airel," my dad said, "after all that's happened, I would like you to please explain to me your side of the story. I need to know what has been happening with you and him." He thrust a finger in Michael's direction.

Before I could say anything, Michael jumped in. "Mr. Cross, my dad was an exporter." He just blurted it right out.

"Michael, don't feel like you have to explain for me," I said.

"No, I want to clear this up. It won't be easy, but I want to do it." He turned toward my father. "He told me himself. Stanley Alexander was an exporter of . . . of slaves, okay? He was a human trafficker. He sold people, mostly young girls, and it was probably an international thing." He paused for a moment, taking his time. "As I think back on it—and I've been doing a lot of thinking lately—it seems like it would make sense that he'd been doing it for years. I never dreamed he was—I didn't think that kind of thing could even happen, much less that my own father would ever be involved in something so evil. But I have to face the facts.

"I thought he was a lawyer. I guess he probably did know at least a little bit of law. But the way he put it into practice was criminal. People are supposed to study law to protect the innocent and uphold justice. Not take it apart and abuse it." He exhaled. "I never bothered to ask, because as a kid, you trust your parents, but ... I guess that explains why we moved around so much."

There was silence. Michael continued. "I learned how to make friends pretty fast and easy. Every time we moved again, the routine got easier." He ran a hand through the soft spikes of his hair and growled low, an expression of frustration. "I don't have any evidence for this, but I think it's pretty obvious—Stanley used me to scout for new recruits. I would make friends with new kids everywhere we went, and then he would—I guess—snatch them up and ship them off to the distributor."

"The distributor," my mom said.

My dad placed a hand on my shoulder. "Michael, what in the world are you talking about? This doesn't sync up with the information I was able to gather by reading wire reports and the AP feed."

"The AP feed," Michael said, "isn't the last word on what really goes on out there, and every 'news' outlet has at least a little propaganda in it."

"Okay. You've summed up eleventh-grade civics. Good. And thanks for the reminder. But are you trying to tell me that your father—Stanley—was the bad guy here? What about this stalker guy, this blond-haired giant who happened to show up in all the wrong places? What about him?"

"Dad—" I said, but he interrupted me.

"No, Airel. He's a big boy. Let him answer for himself."

"Dad," I said, "you're being unnecessarily harsh, don't you think? Michael has—I mean, he lost his dad."

My dad sighed. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But I would still like an explanation. I chased you guys halfway across the world to find you." He fell quiet, and I could imagine that he probably felt a little powerless since, in the end, anyway, he hadn't really done anything except fall into the clutches of a kind of darkness he couldn't have imagined. He'd been drugged, thankfully, so he missed the scariest parts, but then he had reawakened only to see my face, and Michael's too, in that little out-of-the-way hotel room in Simon's Town. Thank God he'd been able to get us home, but still, he had his many questions, and justifiably so. Everything in the middle was still a big blank for him, one that Michael and I would have to fill in very carefully. I took a breath and let it out, hoping Michael had a believable ending and that he would get to it quickly.