One
“Jack Rabbit.I could call myself Jack Rabbit. Since I don’t have a name, would you mind if I stole yours? Name-stealing seems a common practice out here.” Sitting in the California desert twilight, Damon Ives Jackson—or maybe it was just Damon Ives or No Nameatall—poked campfire embers while keeping an eye on the rabbit frozen in the shadows of a Joshua tree.
If he was the son of an identity-stealing killer, he needed to know that before he could proceed. For all he knew, he owed some poor family everything he ever earned.
Learning that his parents were frauds was a pervasive black cloud he couldn’t blow off. He’d spent his career fighting fraud—irony at its worst.
The rabbit, of course, did not reply. Three days alone in the desert—maybe he was starting to hallucinate. Or having a psychic vision. Jax—the name he’d been called all his life—was almost envious of the women he’d met back east who thoroughly believed in their paranormal abilities. He could use a magical gift or two to solve his dilemma.
He’d best not think about the miniature whirlwind with orange curls he’d left behind. Evie would have something succinct to say about his current state, if she didn’t murder him first.
The rumble of a vehicle hitting the ruts of the old dirt road intruded on his misery.
Jax accepted the incongruity of an approaching vehicle in the middle of nowhere. Someone had to be paying the taxes on acres of dirt. Maybe they’d shoot him for trespassing.
A Jeep parked next to Jax’s old Subaru. He’d sold his classic XKE and his condo when he’d left Georgia. The Subaru had served him well as transportation and housing on his quest to find the answer to a decades-old mystery in California. He hated to return defeated, but he had few options left.
The man climbing out of the Jeep was tall and rangy and a total stranger.
“Lost, are you?” Jax asked before the intruder could speak.
“Thought you might be. You drove all the way from Georgia to commune with the Joshua trees?”
His license plate, of course. Just because Evie had taught him there might be magic in the world didn’t mean most things didn’t have a practical basis.
“You a ranger? I didn’t think I was harming anything.” Jax didn’t get up or even bother looking at the unwanted visitor.
“Conan Oswin, not a ranger, possibly a distant cousin, though. Mind if I have a seat?” He folded up on the ground with the confidence of someone who didn’t anticipate refusal and produced two beers from a backpack.
Cousin, huh. He’d been roaming this part of California for six weeks and had yet to find more than pieces of paper indicating the existence of the man who might or might not have been his father. He’d left a pretty wide search trail, so even this remark didn’t surprise him. Jax popped the top of the beer can without a word. He’d learned interrogation at the hands of masters.
“Military, like my brother Magnus,” Conan guessed. “Irritating as all hell when he gets silent like that.”
Exactly. Jax took a sip of the cold beer and waited.
His companion stretched long legs encased in worn hiking boots toward the fire. “My sis-in-law leaves sticky trails all over the internet. Genealogy is Nadine’s specialty. She has access to databases most people don’t know exist.”
Genealogy databases—DNA. Jax had submitted his over a month ago in hopes of learning who his real father was. He hadn’t had any response yet. “I’m guessing Ancestry.com didn’t send you out here to tell me I’m 88% Anglo-European.”
“Actually, you’re in the range of 20% Native American. As soon as the match to my family showed up, Nadine went on red alert. She’s a trifle OC.” The stranger looked like a laidback surfer. He didn’t move a muscle that wasn’t necessary and swept his overlong blond hair out of his face with a toss.
“Yourfamily?” Maybe he really was hallucinating. Who in hell haunted DNA laboratories? Crazy people and cops.
He’d already seen the percentage. Native American explained his blade of a nose and easily tanned skin. But then, he’d always assumed he’d inherited those from his mother, who never claimed to be a Georgia belle.
Conan Oswin continued. “There are genetic markers distinctive to the Ives family, and we’ve both got them.”
Jax ignored the twitch of confusion at being identified as an Ives. He wanted to be the Jackson he’d thought he was. This stretch of the Mojave had once been the ranch and mine of one AaronIves, a man he’d never heard of until a few weeks ago. The Franklin Jackson Jax had called dad, who had died in Georgia almost twenty years ago, had the fingerprints of Aaron Ives.Why?
Jax took another swig of the man’s beer. Did he dare hope that this Conan Oswin person knew about the mysterious Aaron Ives?
“Don’t know where you picked up the Jackson bit,” Oswin continued. “But you sure got saddled with one of the Ives’ crappy first names. We’re Magnus, Conan, and Dylan. Try one of those on for size.”
Damon Ives maybe-Jackson flung a pebble at the campfire. “Sounds like my theoretical dad must have known yours. I can’t even call myself Jax anymore.”
“Call yourself Alien Number One. Your name only matters to you. Choose one.” The intruder didn’t show the least curiosity in Jax’s story—because he already knew it?
That thought caused more than a twitch. “You’re an Oswin, not an Ives,” Jax pointed out, irrelevantly. There were far more important questions to ask, but the name problem pressed on him.