Free The Lost by Caridad Piñeiro Page A

off from the balcony railing and headed indoors, away from the impending storm that matched the mounting disturbance inside him. He stalked from hisbedroom along the lengthy hall lined with empty rooms and then jogged down the stairs. On the first floor he barely spared a glance at the large open floor plan some designer had thought appropriate for a man of his wealth and importance. To Adam the house and all its luxurious contents had been just things to impress prospective investors in SolTerra.
    It would never be a home without more, he thought. Without the joy and love he had seen radiating from Bobbie’s face in the photos resting on her wall unit.
    He hurried down the stairs to the basement, where he had his home office and laboratory. Placing his face close to a retinal scanner securing the glass door, he waited for the system to validate his identity. When the magnetic lock disengaged, he walked into the state-of-the-art facility that rivaled those at his SolTerra location. To the uninitiated, it might seem as if they had discovered Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, but to Adam it represented the possibilities of what his company could do.
    For all that
he
could do with enough power. Power that he was lacking right now.
    He had to recharge himself.
    Normally he did so by meditation to absorb free-floating energy particles in the atmosphere, or with occasional experiments testing the life forces of other living things. In the last few months, however, the growing call of the power had led him to try bigger and better ways of hunting the energy. In doing so, Adam had learned that he seemed to have a natural affinity for all things electrical—funny, in a way, given the work he had chosen to do with SolTerra. It had made him wonder if that hadn’t been some kind of subconscious choice all those yearsago when he had decided to devote his studies and work to alternative energies.
    Regardless, his company had been developing new methods of harvesting forces in nature, and tonight he would not only test one of those methods, but also attempt to use it to restore the vitality he had lost.
    Adam rushed over to the computers and engaged them by placing his thumb against another reader. His father had taught him the value of defending against intrusion and to never second-guess an opponent. If someone got through the first door, he still wouldn’t be able to access his network without clearing another hurdle.
    A panel of monitors jumped to life after the system confirmed his identity. Each screen contained different bits of information, from the sensors tracking the incoming storm to the readings from his last energy-harvesting session. The end result of that experiment, the withered remains of the small purple foxglove plant, sat on the worktable.
    He had chosen the foxglove for its known medicinal values, and to his surprise, the readings he had gotten from the plant had been higher than those from the plain old potted fern he had used as a baseline. That had served to put him on notice that he might want to somehow gather those different healing energies.
    But he wasn’t the one needing healing, he thought, recalling Bobbie’s pained expression and the guarded way she had moved after the run-in with the men.
    Too bad his only power seemed to be to take and not to give, he thought, with a last look at the emaciated plant. He had only sipped a bit of its life force, but it had been too much for the plant to handle. The power he had gatheredhad not even been enough to allow for any physical change from the energy.
    Not that he had any intention of shifting into your average garden-variety petunia. Too many remnants of the borrowed life force often came over during such an exchange, like the flight instincts of the cat that evening. He had no idea what would happen if he shapeshifted into a nonsentient form.
    Tossing the pot into a wastebasket, he sat down at the computer and viewed the radar reports on the incoming weather. The