Looking For The Light (Book 2)

Looking For The Light Chapter 1 - Elijah

            The train ride was only supposed to last two hours, but that was already too long for Elijah Coates.  He’d barely held it together for the twenty minutes they spent on the platform at the station.  London disappeared behind him, and the lights were gone as the train car slipped below ground, into the tunnel that connected England to the European mainland.  What a perfect metaphor for his life.  Eli was leaving everything he knew behind, and heading too quickly into the blind unknown future.

            He was already missing his brother, even though Levi had just seen him off at the platform.  The last time they had been separated by such a distance, and for such an unforeseeable length of time, Levi had been leaving for college.  The still-high school-aged Eli was left behind with their parents, which sent the younger Coates into a panic.  Their father had a bad temper and seemed perpetually frustrated with Elijah’s decision to stay mute.  The only times Eli had been spared from the physical side of his father’s anger, were instances when Levi was there to take the blow himself.  With his brother and protection gone, Eli had started to fear for his safety in his own house.  Back then, just as he thought of it now, it was always his house – never his home.

            Levi had always been the steadying figure in Eli’s life.  He had taught his younger brother to ride a bike and to play soccer.  Levi read Eli stories at night when both boys were supposed to be asleep in bed.  It was Levi that first learned of Elijah’s emergent telepathy, beside Eli himself.  When Eli moved to London to attend college, Levi was there to pick him up at the train station.  If there was an always in Eli’s life, it was Levi.

            Eli was happy that Levi had been there to say goodbye, but his brother wasn’t really whom Eli had wanted to see.  Part of Eli’s heart and mind still held onto the hope that Valentina still loved him.  He left her a message, texted of course, days ago, and another that morning.  Eli spent the minutes from his arrival at the station until the moment the train door had slid shut hoping to see Valentina on the floor of St. Pancreas station, with tears in her eyes, apologizing for their fight and promising her love.  Her absence broke his heart all over again.

            Eli had not yet mourned his relationship.  It had been weeks since Valentina walked out of his life, but he had barely acknowledged it so far.  Instead, Eli had thrown himself into his work for an investigation run by a team of Russian Special Forces and a lone American CIA agent.  He’d simply pushed his pain aside.  His life was routine, without thought: Wake, shower and dress, breakfast, cigarette while walking the dogs, office, take notes on translations, cigarette, lunch, cigarette, take notes on translations, home, then a cigarette while walking the dogs, dinner, shower and dress, sleep.  His day was a palindrome of itself.  He hadn’t even noticed how one offered cigarette the night before Valentina left him – his very first - had very quickly become an addictive habit of his own.  The thoughtless process of his day had protected Eli so far.  If he didn’t think of himself at all, he didn’t have to think about his loss.  If he only thought about work, he didn’t have time to hurt.  But his strategy had failed him. 

Only days ago, the leader of the Russians, Captain Viktoriya Sima had informed Eli that their team had translated and taken notes on every available piece of information on the case – a fifteen year old missing persons.  They exhausted every bit of physical evidence the team, the Spetsgruppa Drakon Pushki, could produce.  All they had left was instinct, not very reliable on such a cold case, and the occasional telepathic communication that took place between Elijah and the missing, and formerly-presumed-dead Yuri Utkin.  Viktoriya confessed also having communicating with him, but it had happened more frequently between Yuri and Eli.

While searching for the body or resting place of a different presumed-dead man, Captain Mikhail Sima, they had found that one of Sima’s subordinates had been taken with him, and if Elijah hoped Captain Sima was still alive, he should hope for Utkin as well.  Especially considering that Yuri Utkin had saved his life on three occasions.