Awakening (Kindle and ePub)

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Critically Acclaimed Romantic Suspense Novel
~An adventure through Santorini, Luxor, and Venice~

Kallie Andreas is a mystery, even to herself.

Seven years ago Kallie woke up in a New York City museum, injured and traumatized. Alone and unclaimed.

Despite her shattered memories, she's made a quiet life for herself as museum curator. But then the blackouts start. Lost time, stranded in terrifying danger, frantic visions that can't be real.

And now Kallie's journal has morphed into something else... What began as a romantic fairy tale becomes the tale of a woman plunged into crisis in the ancient misty islands of Minoan Greece, home to myth and legend.

When a mysterious billionaire invites Kallie to scour the black market with him for the most valuable of all Minoan treasures, Kallie can't resist. Dimitri is wealthy, charming and good-looking, but she's not interested--not in someone who's clearly hiding secrets of his own.

Meanwhile, Kallie's memories are bleeding through and her journal has turned violent. She's teetering on the verge of a breakthrough, but what devastating truth has she been suppressing?

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“Thanks for this awesome adventure Tracy; it was beyond all my hopes or expectations!”

“The heady pace takes the reader from one world to another, blending allegory with a question humanity has asked since the dawn of life—”What is truth?”

“This book will stay with me like some of the past greats. It is a timeless gem of life, love, tragedy. To understand that this maze of life can be most meaningful when we search for truth, dignity, justice and kindness.”

“I can honestly say this is the best book I've read in years!”

“Higley is a master storytelling of the first order. Her characters are interesting and compelling, and this story is incredibly original and exciting.”

“Tracy Higley has blended the ancient past with the present in a tale that has me turning pages far into the night.”

“Tracy Higley, once again brings excitement to the reader! This book makes you feel like you are riding a camel, in Egypt, makes you want to put your fingers in the Venice canal, and feel the beauty of the Greek Isles.”

“The book is fast-paced and gripping from the beginning. Most definitely one of her best books mystery, adventure and romance. Goes to the top of my favorite’s list. A must read!!”

“I just got done reading this book and have to say that it is one of the best books, if not the very best, that I have ever read… Tracy takes you on a journey to the past that blends with the present… Buy this book, you won't be disappointed. It is a page turner from page one!”

“It has all the elements in it - drama, suspense, love and faith. I loved the fact that there were so many different levels to the story all woven together to keep you reading until all hours of the morning.”

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Enjoy a sample from Awakening

PART I

* * *

NEW YORK CITY

CHAPTER ONE

The world outside Kallie’s apartment was unreal—a hazy fairy tale sucking her into itself as she dashed from her building into the gray morning chill and descended rain-slicked concrete steps to the city street. 

Not a happily-ever-after fairy tale. 

Kallie hesitated on the sidewalk, turned, and eyed the massive door to her apartment building, then ran a hand through the dark waves of her hair, flattening quickly in the damp. 

Should she bolt back upstairs for an umbrella? 

Overhung with scudding clouds and wrapped in an evil mist, the murky streets had all the feel of the Brothers Grimm about them—tales of stepsisters who cut off parts of their feet to fit the glass slipper and wicked queens forced to dance in fiery iron shoes until they dropped dead. 

But she was late already for her Yearly Ritual. And the portal to the underground labyrinth of subway tunnels yawned only three blocks east. If she hustled, she could descend into their protection before the clouds fractured and soaked her through. Better to push forward and attempt repairs to her hair when she reached the museum.

She flipped the collar of her white trench coat upward and soldiered on. She clutched her soft-sided laptop case to her body, kept her head down, and wove through sluggish pedestrians, dodging wayward umbrellas and stepping over puddles. The wind was strangely warm for March, with a hint of salt impossible this far from the sea. The kind of peculiar wind that dampened the soul and whispered of longings unfulfilled, of desires just out of reach.

The three blocks stretched, and the metallic-rimmed eyes of a hundred windows seemed to watch her rush to the subway. The streets smelled of rotting leaves and garbage in corners and sausages cooked by street vendors braving the elements—a combination of ordinary odors trapped by weighted air and the city fermenting, composting around her. 

Such black thoughts.

But it was always this way—on this day.

March twenty-first. Vernal equinox. Her birthday, as Judith called it. And if so, only her seventh birthday, with the rest lost in mist thicker than the New York air. 

Her mouth tasted of three cups of bitter coffee and her nerves jittered to match. She’d needed overcaffeination to face the day, but it had been a mistake. Her stomach swirled in uneasy rhythm with the unpredictable sky. She reached the subway entrance at last, already swallowing people at this early hour, and sighed in relief. 

She’d left her apartment late. The six-fifteen train would have come and gone. It meant standing on the platform, pressed into the restless crowd, staring like a single, many-eyed beast down the dark tunnel, waiting for the tremor underfoot to signal rescue. 

She followed the red-painted stripe down the stairs, into the tunnel, and ran her gaze along the chipped and peeling red line as it disappeared into darkness—Ariadne’s thread leading into the labyrinth.

A middle-aged man in a floppy-brimmed wool hat slouched against the wall, some kind of stringed instrument in his hands. He played, but the discordant, jerky plucks on overtight strings sounded more like cat howls than music. Kallie stood apart from the crowd, closer to the wall, and fished a few dollars out of her bag. She stepped across to the open case beside him, dropped the money into a pool of coins and scattered bills, and gave him a quick smile. The musician ceased plucking and brought his gaze from the lyre-like instrument to Kallie’s face.

A sudden shiver ran through her, like the vibration the train would soon cause, but there was no train. She checked.

He was dressed in grays and whites, with clean-shaven, plaster-colored skin. Beside him lay a wooden cane, intricately carved with twisting snakes. He wore sandals over large bare feet. 

Sandals with oddly placed decorative pieces on either side, like tiny wings. She shuddered again. 

Kallie knew her Homer well. Not only the Iliad and Odyssey, but the lesser-known works and hymns. Winged sandals, stringed instrument, the snake-twined caduceus staff.

Hermes. Messenger of the gods. 

He watched her still, not unkindly. She took a step backward. The look in his eyes had more of pity than gratitude. The hollow silence of the tunnel pressed against her, and she steadied herself with a shaky hand against the grimy wall.

He opened his lips, held them open as though summoning speech from another world. When he spoke, the words were quiet, earnest. Had she expected the booming voice of a prophet? 

“Shattered mirrors can be mended.” 

Kallie swallowed, looked toward the empty tunnel, and stepped away. To anyone else, his words would have indicated mental imbalance. 

Not to her. 

The platform began its quivering and the commuters shifted, prepared for the battle of the daily commute. Kallie joined them, welcoming the train and the escape it provided from the sandaled stranger.

The inside of the car smelled of fumes and people and neglect. Kallie stood alone and apart, as though untouchable in her immaculate white coat. She forced herself not to think about the odd stranger, the Yearly Ritual even, and focused solely on tonight’s big bash. 

The grand reopening of the museum’s Greek and Roman exhibits would be celebrated by a fund-raising gala—an invitation-only, black-tie soirée. As the department’s curator, Judith would give an impassioned plea for funding, with special emphasis placed on Kallie’s pet project, the Minoan Collective. She let her mind drift to the wonderful possibilities the funding could bring to life. She could truly focus her passions on the Collective, set aside the more mundane duties of assistant department curator, and spend her days digging through the fascinating past, uncovering secrets long buried. 

The past. Like shattered mirrors. What did the man say? “Shattered mirrors can be mended.” 

She tried to visualize mending a mirror while absently studying the subway map posted above the darkened windows. The red thread twisted and trailed under the city, a faithful guide through the maze, a sure path to her true home: the museum. 

Yes, home. For it was the museum where seven years ago she was truly born.

The subway shrieked to an abrupt stop and the doors swooshed open, sucking commuters onto the next platform. Kallie held the strap of her case against her shoulder and stepped across the narrow gap between train and concrete, her toes just across the universal yellow line of danger. And stopped.

Around her, passengers jostled and flowed like river water around a jutting stone. Kallie could not move.

Across the platform, against another red-striped filthy wall, sat a musician with a strange instrument and winged sandals.

He met her eyes. Of course he did. 

Did no one else find it strange to see him there again? They hurried up the steps, up into the world, as though the gods had not broken through to mortals. 

She heard the doors slide closed behind her, felt the rumble of the train as it surged away, pulling air into the vacuum it created. A dizziness swept her, threatened to drag her backward into the void. Her mouth was plaster dust. Would this messenger give a different message?

Ariadne’s thread was unraveling. 

Kallie teetered backward, a black fuzziness at the edge of her vision, hand gripping the strap at her shoulder as if it could anchor her to the floor. The tracks below were magnetic, pulling, pulling her downward. 

It was the sort of damsel-in-distress moment that screamed for a hero to swoop in and save her. 

Kallie yanked her unruly thoughts together and rescued herself. 

She was headed home—and nothing would stop her, including hallucinations. Sidestepping Hermes without a glance, she bounded up the steps to the city block, hurried along the street, then stopped at the foot of the museum. 

The clouds still hoarded their rain, thankfully. She stepped inside and sped past the wide stone stairs of the visitor’s entrance to a half-hidden door marked Employees Only. A swipe of her card and she was across the threshold, safe from imagination and paranoia, hair still wavy, white coat still immaculate. She exhaled, then shook her head to center her thoughts. Yes, it was only the Yearly Ritual. It did strange things to her mind. 

She hurried through the empty corridor to the elevator, her mind skittering over the past, the subway, the gala tonight, and finally settling on the present moment as the elevator deposited her at the entrance to the third-floor Greek and Roman exhibits. 

Compared to the squalor of city and subway, the pristine white glow of statuary with its clarified air and holy hush of empty halls felt more like temple than museum. Kallie’s shoulders relaxed, her breathing evened out, even the caffeine seemed to leach out of her system. 

She drifted through Andreas Hall, absently pulling thin white gloves from her bag and slipping them over her chilled fingers. She ran a reverent hand over the foot of Zeus, the robe of Athena as she passed. The tracks of myth ran heavy through time, through all cultures of the past. If the divine could be known, surely it would make itself known here.

The statues and friezes called out their connection to something beyond mortality, but it was the marble relief at the end of the hall that drew her to itself. This time she did not resist its magnetic pull. Not today.

The relief was anchored to the wall, a solid piece of marble measuring thirty-one inches wide and nineteen inches high. Carved in the Hellenistic period, circa 320 BCE. Garlands of flowers, grapes, and pomegranates. Beneath the swags, Theseus slaying the Minotaur.

She stopped before it, lowered her laptop case to the floor, and traced its contours first with her eyes, then her gloved fingers. Searching, as she always did, for answers. The museum dropped away and she closed her eyes, sleepy and trancelike, and drank in the stone through her sense of touch alone, a blind woman desperate for truth. 

Why here? Why then?

The gloves were not long enough to cover her wrists, and when she opened her eyes, her gaze strayed from the marble relief to the faint red markings that striated her skin. Markings of her past. Her unknown past. 

Seven years ago, doctors suspected she had attempted suicide. Upon further study, it was decided they were rope burns. Angry, deep rope burns that suggested captivity and torture and unnamed horrors. 

The burns had healed to pink scars. How could the unknown be healed? It was a shattered mirror.

Brisk footsteps advanced behind her. She needn’t turn. She knew the gait, expected the arrival.

“Happy birthday, Kallista.” 

Judith never used her nickname. Always the full name, Kallista. 

Kallie inhaled, dropped her hands from the relief, but did not turn.

The curator had a right to formality. It was Judith who had named her. Kallista, the ancient Greek name for the island of Santorini. Andreas, for the family whose charitable contributions over many generations had funded the holdings, the research, and the staffing of the museum’s 

Greek collections. Kallista Andreas was a product of the museum, through and through.

“Anything this year?” Judith’s New York accent carried eager curiosity. 

At her question, Kallie’s thoughts fluttered over the heraldic weather, the subway hallucination, her jittery emotions. None of it connected or made sense. She shook her head and turned. “Nothing.” 

Judith Bittner was a short woman, slight though exuding power, refusing to age past sixty. She wore her salt-and-pepper hair short and spiky around her face, dressed exclusively in black, and had eyes the color of steely blue sapphire. To the interns and newer staff, she was a force of nature to be feared and obeyed. The museum was her life.

For seven years Judith had been a strange mix of fairy godmother and wicked stepmother to Kallie, in turns gifting her with a name, an education, and a job—all the while goading her to work harder, work longer, for meager pay and even less affirmation. For Kallie, it was hard to say whether she hated Judith or loved her. 

The older woman held out a package in her hand and stretched it across the space between them. 

Kallie accepted the red-wrapped square with both hands, then removed her gloves before pulling off the wrapping. A leather journal, tooled with intricate swirls. She feathered the pages —blank, with thin blue lines.

Judith’s voice was oddly uncertain. “I thought, perhaps, you might want to begin a journal. 

Start a story.”

Kallie felt the outline of something else in the wrappings and removed a lovely woodgrained pen. Both items were clearly expensive. She raised moist eyes. The gift was unusually sentimental for Judith. “Thank you.” Her voice wavered with uncertainty at the idea. The journal and pen felt heavy in her hands, substantial. As if they held power to create a story for her, one that could not begin any further back than seven years, but perhaps was worth the telling all the same.

Judith shrugged one shoulder, all business again, and jutted her chin toward the marble relief. “Take as much time as you need.” Her clipped footsteps echoed away and she disappeared around the corner.

Kallie returned her attention to the relief, but the spell was broken. There was no use taking more time. Despite her faithfulness to the Yearly Ritual, this corner of the museum never yielded answers. She hoped—and feared—one day there would be a staggering revelation that would change her life forever. But it never happened. She was reading too much into weather, people, any variation in her life for clues. 

She tossed the journal, pen, and wadded red paper into her bag, shoving everything mystical into the dark tangle of her soul, and strode purposefully toward her office. There was much to do before tonight’s event.

She crossed the entrance hall and slipped through a small door marked Private. She bypassed several small offices, each one cramped and overflowing with shelves of books, reams of paper, and lesser-valued museum pieces in transit, including Judith’s, and entered her own tiny space with a sense of reprieve. She closed the door and exhaled. The Yearly Ritual was over. 

She would not go near the marble piece again until the first day of spring next year.

Kallie pulled her laptop from its case, mulling over the final details of the brochure she’d been working on for the past week. She needed to get the file to the in-house printer in time for tonight. Maybe glossy paper for the tri-fold piece, to show off the high-resolution images of the collection’s latest Minoan acquisitions. It was the text that needed work, needed crafting into the perfect combination of fascinating fact and passionate plea to open the pocketbooks of the wealthy for the funding she desperately needed for the Minoan Collective. 

Then perhaps she could let go of the past. The Collective was her future—a reason to exist. 

A repayment to Judith for all she’d done. Kallie could be part of a team, find a place to belong. And in the process, she would become the world’s foremost authority on Minoan culture, for the good of this research community and the museum, of course. 

A photo of a terra-cotta tablet lay on her desk, and she squinted at the ancient, unknown script. Linear A, still a lost language, had been her passion since grad school. The mysterious language fed her obsessive desire to understand the past and flowed through her veins like a lifegiving river. Tonight’s event could be the key to unlocking the symbols. Eagerness shot through her. She would transfer her passions so powerfully in the brochure that others would be ignited as well. She sat down and poured herself into communicating through words and pictures the very essence of her heart’s longing. 

Two hours later, she e-mailed the brochure file to the printer, but heightened anxiety over its perfection drove her out of her office to speak personally with the print staff. 

The museum had opened to the public while she’d been holed up in her windowless office, and now in Andreas Hall, the sun dissolved the morning mist and streamed through the huge, high windows flanking the room. It was a glorious sight, and she drank it in as she walked. She passed Judith, speaking to a group of school-age children. Judith could have delegated the duty to Kallie or another assistant, but the older woman seemed to thoroughly enjoy educating the school groups. 

Her eyes immediately flicked to Kallie. She wrapped up her comments with a big smile, directed the group to the next hall, then hurried to catch up with her protégé.

“Kallista, a word.”

Could she run? “I was just going to the printer, to make sure—”

Judith waved away the explanation. “Yes, yes, your precious brochure. People aren’t moved by brochures, Kallista.”

Kallie locked eyes with her, raising her chin and frowning at the insult. “That’s why we have you, Judith. To close the deal.”

Judith’s blue-bright eyes bore into her. “Passion, Kallista. It’s passion that moves them, gets them opening their wallets and writing their checks.” Her eyebrows drew together, a dark V that made Kallie nervous. “And no one is more passionate about Linear A than you.” 

Kallie shook her head, anticipating Judith’s next words. “My passion’s flowing through the entire brochure, Judith. As soon as they look at it, they will feel the excitement, understand the need. I’m the visionary. You’re the speech maker.” 

Judith struck like a viper, her fingers biting into Kallie’s arm. “Do I need to remind you how important tonight—?”

“Exactly!” Kallie winced. “That’s why it needs to come from you. You have the credentials, the reputation, the respect.” She yanked her arm from Judith’s grasp and glared at her. “The funding is far too important to have an assistant make the plea.”

Judith sniffed and lifted her chin, meeting Kallie’s gaze. “Passion trumps position.” 

Kallie crossed her arms. “Money trumps everything. They are thinking first about their money.”

“Dimitri Andreas will be here.”

If she thought her announcement would sway Kallie, she was mistaken. All the more reason for Judith to make the speech. The mysterious, newly appointed patriarch of the Andreas family —for whom the Greek collection’s hall had been named—had just returned from years in Europe. It would be his first visit to the museum that had benefitted immensely from his family’s generosity. Kallie narrowed her eyes. She was done with this conversation.

Judith glanced left and right, then spoke quietly. “Supposedly, he has information about the 

Key.”

Kallie’s breath sucked inward and she leaned forward. “What information?” The question came out as a whisper, conspiratorial and urgent.

Judith’s eyes glowed in victory as she shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him. Tonight. After you speak.” 

The curator spun around, sauntered off, and rejoined the schoolchildren who were filing into the corridor outside Andreas Hall. Her arms flung upward as she extolled the virtues of a statue of Apollo.

Kallie sighed. She would deal with Judith later. Make sure she knew Kallie would not speak. She was better suited for behind-the-scenes research, not a public platform. The professional periodical article she was putting together had a better chance of gaining her funding than any speech she might make. 

Right now, she needed to get to the printer before he could make a mistake with her brochure.

On the wall above the room’s exit, a strange shadow wavered, thrown there by the sunlit window panel behind her. She turned in time to see an enormous bird sail past, its wings nearly unmoving. A hawk? 

Shaking off the obvious myth-born significance, she escaped Andreas Hall.

Hours later, eyes blurred from research, she lifted her head from her desk to find the clock reading four. Time to get home and get ready for the gala. But first to find Judith and remind her that Kallie’s role would be secondary tonight.

She gathered up her laptop, bag, and papers and was about to leave the office when her desk phone rang. She hesitated, deciding whether to let it ring to voice mail, then swung her bag against her hip and grabbed the receiver.

“Kallista Andreas.” Her professional voice automatically kicked in.

There was no sound but soft breathing on the other end. She half smiled. A prank call? To a museum? 

But then a raspy hiss. “I know you who you are.” 

Kallie froze. It was most likely a woman’s voice. But who? The laptop bag slipped from her shoulder, hit the floor with a thunk.

The voice sizzled. “Stay away from what is not yours.”