Sharing The Darkness
Marilyn Tracy
Devil's bargain…Teo Sandoval's unearthly power caused storms to rage and lightning to tear across the sky.Tall, dark and brooding, he was called the devil's spawn by some. His laughter held no humor, and conjured images of smoke and fire. He wanted nothing to do with society. Until one night Melanie Daniels swept into his life, pleading for his help…Melanie was desperate. Scared. Fleeing from unscrupulous scientists who wanted to control her son's telekinetic abilities. She would do anything to save her baby–even if it meant seeking out the compelling man whose caresses unleashed a dark yearning within her. Even if it meant becoming the devil's woman
“I’ll do anything. Pay anything!”
Melanie said fiercely. “Only help me save my son.”
Teo stared at her coldly. “The price is too high for anyone to pay.”
Wild hope swept through her. “Anything,” she repeated. “I have money. Not much. I have a house—”
“You,” he cut in harshly.
“I don’t understand….”
“You said anything I want. I want you. You are the price.”
Melanie felt as if the edges of the universe were slipping away. Teo’s silver-blue gaze burned into hers, and she had the odd notion he was seeing her very soul….
Marilyn Tracy lives in Portales, New Mexico, in a ram-shackle turn-of-the-century house with her son, two dogs, three cats and a poltergeist. Between remodeling the house to its original Victorian-cum-Art Deco state, writing full-time and finishing a forty-foot cement dragon in the backyard, Marilyn composes complete sound tracks to go with each of her novels.
Having lived in both Tel Aviv and Moscow in conjunction with the U.S. State Department, Marilyn enjoys writing about the cultures she’s explored and the peoples she’s grown to love. She likes to hear from people who find pleasure in her books and always has a pot of coffee on or a glass of wine ready for anyone dropping by, especially if they don’t mind chaos and know how to wield a paintbrush.
Sharing the Darkness
Marilyn Tracy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u69bf3b15-5fc4-536d-ba83-abc092cd530e)
CHAPTER TWO (#u589d1d8d-682e-55ea-8ec1-a5d19693887b)
CHAPTER THREE (#ua24bd539-961a-5d84-8c88-acb2b96333c5)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
A man’s scream and a loud metal-crunching crash echoed simultaneously through the narrow canyon valley. Both sounds, hard and desperate, seemed to come from everywhere, the cloud-heavy sky, the cold misting rain, the sodden ground beneath Melanie’s feet. She whirled right, then left, as did the gas station attendant and the two old men playing checkers in front of the station.
Perhaps because of the trauma she’d been through in the last few weeks, the last few years, she immediately closed her mind to the outside influences of the world. A terrifying thought struck her. Had Chris had any part in that noise she’d heard? His talent—her curse—was growing stronger every day, partially thanks to the efforts of the scientists at the Psionic Research Institute. They had wanted to train him, and had only succeeded in frightening them both and making her life—and Chris’s—a living hell.
Guilt stabbed her with sharp recrimination. How could she even think that Chris might be involved? Hadn’t her three-year-old had to face enough blame and fear in his young life without his mother succumbing to anxiety about what he might have done?
But a quick look assured her that she needn’t have worried; her three-year-old totally ignored the almost preternatural silence. A soft smile played on his lips, his baby face was lit with an inner contentment and, as was usual since his days at the Psionic Research Institute, his small, chubby fingers wiggled in waving motions.
A host of small items—a comb, a red ball, a comic book action figure, a plastic lid from a fast-food drive-in, even a tube of lipstick—danced around the interior of the car, hovering in the air, set to a tune only Chris could hear. And they were held in midair by his mind only, little puppets controlled by a small puppeteer.
Melanie swiftly looked around to see if anyone was watching her car but didn’t relax when she saw that no one was paying her son the slightest attention. When was the last time she had relaxed? She couldn’t remember. It may have been the day before young Chris was born. And she’d been in labor then.
Another scream rent the air and Melanie gasped. Chris’s eyes didn’t so much as flicker. His entire focus was upon his little collection of dancing objects, which whirled so effortlessly, so defiantly, in midair. He’d always had the ability to manipulate the world around him, even as early as six months old, when he’d turned the toys on the windowsill into a mobile over his bed.
But until his days at the PRI, he’d been easily distracted and the toys would drop to the ground. Whatever they’d done to him, he’d apparently found a place to escape. Now when Chris concentrated on making his toys dance, he was totally oblivious to the rest of the world.
Only violent shaking or abrupt body contact could snap him from this unusual withdrawal. This was what the scientists at the PRI had done for him. To him. And they would have done far more if they’d had the opportunity…an opportunity she was determined not to give them, despite their threats.
At least, Melanie thought bleakly now, Chris hadn’t been the cause of whatever crash had taken place in these lonely mountains.
But something had.
In the stillness following the tremendous racket—a silence made all the more noticeable by the lack of any jays’ raucous calls—one of the old men spat tobacco juice onto the muddy pathway that served as a sidewalk flanking the gas station. The dark spittle narrowly missed a wet paint-chipped sign that had long since faded into little more than a testimony of poverty and abandonment. The sign read Loco Suerte.
To Melanie, lost in the back roads of northern New Mexico, trying to escape the clutches of the PRI scientists, tired from two steady weeks of fruitless searching for the only man she thought might be able to help them, and now standing stock-still in a chill October mist, the scream still echoing in her ears, the village’s name was curiously apt…Crazy Luck. It was just the kind of luck she would have.
The old man who’d spit spoke in a lisping Castillian Spanish that she automatically, though with some difficulty, translated. “Demo. His vehicle slipped. Demo’s car fell off that loco jack he made.” His voice was as lacking in emotion as his face, but creaked like the door the gas station attendant had pushed through only minutes earlier.
The gas station attendant, or possibly the owner, a short squat man of about fifty with at least three days’ growth of jet black beard, a filthy once white T-shirt, and a thick, black mustache that fully covered his upper lip, barked several curses in Spanish and broke into a run toward the side of his station. Just as he was rounding the corner, he slithered to a muddy stop and yelled at Melanie in English, “She doesn’t turn off! Close the gas, will you, señora?”
As if his words broke some sort of peculiar spell woven by the scream, the crash and the seeming indifference of the old men playing checkers, Melanie turned to “close” the gas, fumbling with the antiquated apparatus that passed as a gas tank. As she did so, she heard the attendant—owner?—yell from out of sight, again in that curiously lisping Castillian Spanish, “Abuelito, call the sheriff for an ambulance! And get me some help here. Demo’s trapped under the car!”
While one of the old men, presumably the grandfather the attendant had called to, pushed his chair back and seemingly slowly reached for the telephone—a device that looked as though it had been installed by Alexander Bell himself—Melanie heard the loud curses of the attendant from the other side of the low, dilapidated building.
Even as the older man called the sheriff, the slip-slop of many feet on the mud street told Melanie that help had arrived. Six or seven men appeared from out of the forest and the nearby adobe structures she had earlier mistaken for abandoned, or, perhaps magically, from the slick, muddy street that five minutes’ earlier had been totally devoid of people. They were followed rapidly by several women, most of them dressed in black, one carrying a small child.
Melanie didn’t feel as if she was in the United States any longer. She had stepped back in time to some mountain village in a different country.
Again Melanie glanced at Chris, willing him in vain to halt his toys’ dance. Again, her worry was in vain. No one noticed her son; all attention was focused on whatever had transpired around the side of the dilapidated garage.
“¡Uno…dos…tres!” the attendant yelled, and on the count of three the combined voices of all the men groaned in seven-part harmony. “Again! Try it again!”
Melanie told an unresponsive Chris to stay in the car, and followed the sound of the voices until she stood just around the pocked corner of the gas station. Then she averted her head in quick negation, closing her eyes sharply against the sight of a man lying too still, apparently crushed by the old Chevy that had lost its mooring on the jack and now was being held some two feet above the man by seven straining men.
“Throw it over,” the attendant yelled.
“But Demo’s Chevy—”
“Throw it over! Who cares about the car? On three…. ¡Uno…dos…tres!”
The heavy, battered classic flipped over with a groaning shudder and slithered down a muddy embankment.
“¡Madre de Dios! He’s alive!” a woman screamed.
Melanie opened her eyes again and tracked the line of the woman’s pointing finger. The mechanic, though bloodied and covered with oil and grime, was indeed feebly moving. Melanie couldn’t have said how, but he was.
“Jaime, andale! Fetch El Rayo!” the attendant yelled. Then, without looking to see if the young man he had clapped on the shoulder did his bidding, he bent over the hapless mechanic.
“But, Pablo…” the young man protested.
“Now, damn it! Fetch him!” the attendant snapped, again without looking at Jaime. The youth stood uncertainly for a moment, then bolted into the thick trees flanking the gas station to the north.
Pablo bent lightly, resting a hand on the injured man’s brow. “Demo…Demo, boy, can you hear me? You’ll be all right. Abuelito called for an ambulance.” The attendant looked upward, as though praying, then back down as he said urgently, “And he comes soon.”
Melanie held her breath. El Rayo—Rah-e-yoh—might be translated to mean The Man of Thunderbolts. Was her quest to be ended this easily? Or was the peculiar term, “El Rayo,” some odd colloquialism for doctor or even ambulance? But the attendant had said, “He comes…”
He…El Rayo.
She’d spent the last nerve-racking two weeks dodging around the country, slinking in and out of seedy hotel rooms at night, spending entire days in a paid-with-cash rental Buick, accompanied only by her unusual and telekinetic son, seeking a man who was said to destroy brick buildings by a mere wave of his hands. A man who, according to the files at the PRI, was a recluse, a barbarian and a would-be killer. A man who could literally move the earth or eradicate it with a look.
Was he the man with thunderbolts in his fingertips?
Melanie realized that until this moment, hearing the odd designation, she had nearly given up hope of finding the man she sought. She had never felt foolish in her quest, that wasn’t it. Anything she could possibly do now, any bizarre hope of saving Chris from the scientific experiments at The Psionic Research Institute was worth any investigation. But just an hour earlier, lost and tired, her back aching from the many miles behind the wheel of her car, and tired of dodging free-floating bits of tissue, food wrappers, or even the road map, she had been prepared to admit defeat.
If there was a powerful telekinetic hiding in these rugged, terrifying mountains, it was obvious he didn’t want to be found. Up to now she’d been relying on every facet of her own telepathic abilities, her own clairvoyance, and they might have led her here, but she wasn’t even sure where here was.
From the files, she’d illegally studied, she’d known he was reclusive. She’d known he’d be hiding. And dangerous? her mind offered. Yes, she’d also known that, both from the files and from her own chaotic and vague dreams in which a man named Teo Sandoval called her name as electricity flew from his very fingertips. Dreams that always left her shaking, a scream choked in her throat.
But at the same time, the very dangerousness that was inherent to the man she sought, dreamed about, was what made him her last hope of saving Chris from being taken from her. Her former husband, Tom, had already signed over his custody rights to the PRI…it hadn’t taken them long to try to secure hers. And when she’d refused, still furious with her ex-husband for even thinking he could get away with such a thing, they had made it perfectly clear how little an obstacle they considered her. If she weren’t around, they’d said, Chris would become a ward of the court. And since Chris’s own father wished them to protect his only son, no court in the world would deny their petition for full custodial rights.
She had fled the institute that night, knowing full well that the PRI scientists, privately funded and not regulated by any governmental watch committees, believed themselves above any and all laws. They had no intention of letting anything get in their way, especially not a mother who didn’t exhibit any sign of their coveted telekinesis. So, by fair or foul means, they planned to snatch Chris and harbor him at the Psionic Research Institute permanently, a captive subject to their bizarre experiments and brutal testings.
A woman holding a small child moaned and sagged, but was caught and shushed by the older woman nearest her. “Be quiet, Doro. Pray. El Rayo comes. One touch and your husband will live. You know. Believe it.”
At this Melanie had to stifle the flood of questions that sprang to her lips. If she voiced any of them, she might be asked to leave, and she couldn’t do that until she was certain this El Rayo wasn’t the man she sought so desperately. To forestall the surge of hope welling inside, she reminded herself that she wasn’t in the rolling countryside of Pennsylvania any more, she was in the backwoods of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, a place where the superstitious populace still believed in curses, witches and miracles. A place where she was the only Anglo in a world of ancient Spanish; the outsider who neither fluently spoke their unusual dialect nor understood their customs.
Pablo pulled back from the mechanic and Melanie had to cover her mouth with both hands to restrain an instinctive cry of dismay. It would take nothing less than a bolt of lightning to help this man. In fact, Melanie doubted there was much a trained physician could do, even if he carried patented miracles in his little black bag, for the mechanic was all too obviously dying. Automatically she lowered her precious mental guard to seek the mechanic’s thoughts and caught them too easily.
Madre de Dios…why can’t I breathe?
She slammed the gates of her mind tightly closed. She couldn’t bear hearing a dying man’s thoughts.
Seeing the crumbling face of the woman holding the child tightly to her shuddering breast, hearing the murmurs of the men around the dying mechanic, Melanie felt disassociated. She seemed in two places at once. Here, in the chill October afternoon rain in a lonely mountain village in northern New Mexico, carnage at her feet, and there, in a too bright laboratory, watching a team of white-coated men attach electrodes to her son’s chubby chest while he cried at the chill of their fingers and shrank from the fear and longing in their eyes.
“The ghost clouds come,” the mechanic’s wife moaned, snapping Melanie back to the present. “Demo will die. See how they come for him!”
Melanie tilted her head to follow the woman’s gaze, not needing to squint her eyes against the soft rain. Thin, fog-like wisps of white snaked through the tall pines, slinking over the high, treeless peaks and silently creeping downward toward the village. Melanie restrained a shudder. She could see why a superstition about the clouds might be generated. They did indeed look like stalking ghosts.
A bird swooped down from a nearby tall pine and, as one, the crowd around the mechanic gasped. The mechanic’s child began to cry, restively, perhaps from being held too tightly against his mother’s breast.
An older woman called out, “An owl! It’s an omen! Call Tierra Amarillo’s church for a priest!”
Pablo growled something about “talking goats” at the woman, then fell silent, his gaze fixing in Melanie’s direction. One by one, the rest of the group turned, grew quiet. For a moment Melanie thought all eyes were trained fearfully on her, then she realized their cumulative gazes were just beyond her shoulder. She felt an almost atavistic fear of turning around to discover what could hold that many voluble people so absolutely silent. Could Chris have left the car, dancing objects in his wake?
She fought the sudden attack of nerves and turned.
The youth, Jaime, stood to one side of the muddy station stalls, as though keeping a fair distance from the man who strode across the water-burdened street toward him and the garage. Melanie had the urge to do the same as the young man and couldn’t resist drawing closer to the damp and chipped adobe wall.
Behind her, the crowd now gathered around the dying mechanic sighed and whispered, “El Rayo…El Rayo.” The muted voices underscored the strangeness of the man approaching them.
He walked as though in no particular hurry, though his stride was steady and broad. Like a bullfighter’s, Melanie thought, snared by the sighing, chanting voices behind her, or like a king’s all-powerful steps.
“The car fell on Demo,” Pablo called out to the silent figure, cutting through the whispers. “He lives. But only just.”
“El Rayo,” the mechanic’s wife begged, “help my Demo, please.”
Melanie turned to look at the group of townspeople and noticed they had all pulled back—like Jaime, like herself—as though contact with this stranger would be injurious to their health. She couldn’t blame them. There was something so dark, so forceful, about the man that it seemed to exude from his very pores. And yet, almost as if whatever it was about him was electrical—and if he was the man she sought, it might very well be electrical in nature—she felt her skin respond to his presence.
He was of Latin descent, with a dark complexion and jet black hair that hung far below the collar of his shirt, farther still, perhaps beneath his shoulder blades. Either one of his recent ancestors had been Anglo or he was a throwback to the true Spanish that had originally settled these mountains, for the man’s eyes were a glittering pale blue-gray, the color of the sky on a stormy winter’s afternoon.
This imposing stranger wasn’t tall, perhaps only six feet or so, but his shoulders were broad enough to strain at his rough flannel shirt. His hips were narrow, and his thighs, tightly encased in his jeans, were muscled and thick. Moisture clung to his dark hair and seemed to shimmer, creating the impression of a dark liquid halo.
This had to be him, Melanie thought wildly; everything about him exuded dark mystery and raw sensuality. He was more spirit than man, a wild black stallion, a lone timber wolf, a clap of thunder on a cloudless night. He gave the impression of absolute power.
She had to know if he was, indeed, Teo Sandoval, the man she’d needed so desperately. She unveiled her mind a notch and reached out to him when he paused, stopping at the side of the building. His eyes seemingly took in the entire scene at a glance.
His mind was questing so—reading all—she couldn’t get through, and dropped her guard another notch.
He said nothing as most of the people tried explaining what had happened at the same time. He turned his gaze finally, and with cool appraisal, to Melanie.
She felt a moment’s pure shock as her gaze linked with his, as his mind tried to probe hers. It was a rare enough occurrence, to actually lock eyes with someone, but it wasn’t the rarity of it that triggered an inner quaking in Melanie. An elemental sexuality seemed to transmit from the stranger like the coldest of mountain winds and, at the same time, like the heat of a cliff’s edge baked too long by a summer sun. She knew instinctively this man was like no one she had ever known before, and she couldn’t seem to think clearly enough to decide whether that boded well or ill.
Lines from the files on him she’d read chased through her mind, incoherent, fleeting. After the fiasco, after his demolishing an entire wing of the PRI when they had pushed him too hard, after he had escaped their clutches, one psychiatrist had written of him: He’s a man of extreme conscience. I don’t know whether Teo Sandoval should be condemned or praised. But at all costs, he should be left alone.
If not for Chris, at that moment Melanie would gladly have turned and left the man alone, abandoned her quest for his help, because, linked with his gaze, for a single, shattering moment she had felt as though they were the only two people on earth. She shivered, feeling totally and wholly exposed. Then she felt him strengthen the probe to her mind, as though ready to rifle through her thoughts, glean every drop of knowledge about her. She swiftly clamped her mind closed, slamming the door on her thoughts, her soul. That slam seemed to echo inside her and it somehow hurt.
Though he didn’t so much as flinch, some instinctive knowledge told her that she wasn’t the only one affected by their exchange. Something about it had shocked him, as well. She had the oddest notion that for a single flicker of time she had been looking into the man’s very soul. She had caught a glimpse of a well of anger and loneliness trapped inside him. An aloneness so extreme that it seemed far removed from any mere lack of human companionship, to the point of being another emotion altogether, one that would make others cringe in terror.
She didn’t have the sensation of reading the man’s thoughts, there was no tingling awareness of any sort of telepathy or mind transference; she knew that feeling all too well. This was more simply and starkly a case of knowing some facet of his innermost feelings. Nothing anyone said could have persuaded her that she was wrong at that moment. What she’d seen, what she’d felt, was an intimacy as strong and bonding as the marriage of night and day, as sharp and poignant as a final farewell.
Something flashed in the man’s eyes and as abruptly as he’d pulled her into the depths of his gaze, she felt released, or more accurately, thrown aside. She had shut her mind to him, but now, brusquely, he was wholly closed to her, as well. He was once again a stranger, and all she could see in his unusual eyes was her own reflection. She shuddered in relief.
He turned from her then and, without having to ask anyone to clear the way, walked through the group that parted for him as they might have for a god…or a monster in their midst. He drew a deep breath, shook his hands out to the side of his body like a fighter preparing for the ring, then slowly knelt over the wheezing mechanic.
It wasn’t until she saw him kneel that Melanie realized he wasn’t carrying that extension of every country doctor’s arm—the medical kit. He had come to aid this mechanic with no more than his bare hands. Or, Melanie thought a little wildly, with his pale, hypnotic eyes.
He was the one. He had to be. Teo Sandoval, a telekinetic whose powers had been strong enough to frighten the PRI, perhaps the only man on earth who could help her save her son from their designs.
Behind him, around him, the odd collection of assistants and relatives made the index finger-over-thumb sign against evil despite their avid gazes. Melanie saw with some sense of irony that now that he wasn’t looking directly at them, all strained to see everything this unusual man might do.
To Melanie’s wonder, then consternation, he appeared to do nothing at all. Then he gently pulled away the mechanic’s bloodied shirt, exposing the ravaged, lacerated chest. Melanie bit her lip to keep from groaning in horror.
El Rayo then raised both hands over the man’s chest and flexed his shoulders as if steeling himself against a great ordeal. A multivoiced sigh rippled through the anxious crowd. As if that were a signal of sorts, El Rayo lowered his rock-steady hands to lay them directly on the man’s bloody chest. Again Melanie had to hold in a cry of instinctive protest.
Though his back was to her, she could see a shudder seize him and shake him as violently as though he were caught in a tornado. A moan escaped the mechanic’s wife and her baby whimpered once, then all were silent again. Even the winged denizens of the forest seemed to be holding their breaths.
Unconsciously, Melanie had drawn closer, and now took another step forward, as much to see better as to offer whatever assistance she might have to give. Pablo’s arm shot out to restrain her. A work-roughened hand encircled her wrist.
“No, señora,” he whispered. “Wait.”
“What is he doing?” she asked, and though she had only breathed the question, she was shushed by the older woman flanking the mechanic’s wife.
“Wait,” the attendant said again, and turned his gaze back to the tableau at their feet.
As if rigidly locked in a battle as ancient as the mountains themselves, the stranger beneath her seemed frozen over the dying mechanic. Ignoring both rain and the people crowded near him, his concentration was solely and absolutely on the man under his hands.
Melanie had the disorienting feeling that she had experienced the merest hint of that concentration just seconds earlier when they had locked gazes. And a dim part of her wondered what his hands would feel like against her skin, and if that deliberation of mind and soul would accompany his touch. She shook her head as though the movement would rid her mind of such unusual imagery.
From the reaction of the crowd, and from the rumors she’d heard, read about, back in Pennsylvania, Melanie half expected thunderbolts to shoot from the rain-heavy sky or for the ghost clouds to come snatch the mechanic and his odd healer from their midst. But in actuality the rain only continued to fall softly and silently, the ground grew muddier, and the people standing around got wetter and colder.
Somehow, to Melanie, this seemingly prosaic attitude of Mother Nature’s only strengthened the illusion of magic that was transpiring before her very eyes. A contrast, nature’s indifferent energy versus that of the man at her feet. She felt as though she were watching a play that had been written in the Dark Ages, but was seeing it unfold in another country, another time.
And in watching this bizarre spectacle wholly at odds with all she had known to be true before, Melanie trembled. Could it be true? Could this man really heal with his touch? She suspected—no, she knew—he would, if by no other means than sheer force of will.
The thought sobered her. And made her hopeful for the first time in six months. Could Chris ever learn to harness his talents for good, for tremendous good, instead of making his toys dance, and instead of the sorts of goals the PRI had in store for him?
She dimly pondered what she was witnessing: an old-fashioned, often disputed healing. Even as she realized the implications of this “healing,” she wondered, almost in anger, what, if it was true, this man was doing in the backwoods of nowhere. Why hide such a gift? If he was indeed such a healer, he should be out in the world helping millions, hundreds of millions.
She remembered the notes on his telekinetic abilities, remarks recorded when Teo Sandoval had been only some nineteen years old and as wild and furious as a trapped mountain creature. And then she remembered the detailed description of his destruction of one entire wing of the PRI. That he hadn’t killed anyone had been a miracle in and of itself. The PRI scientists had termed him “untrainable,” “irredeemable,” a barbarian with untold powers. When he’d fled the institute, no one had tried to stop him. Nor had they done anything to stop the annuity the PRI had established for his father and his heirs when he essentially sold Teo to the PRI almost fifteen years ago. As Tom had tried doing with Chris.
But with such powers, such a tremendous gift for healing, how could Teo Sandoval remain at the edge of nowhere, allowing pain and misery to exist in the world, when by a touch he could alleviate so much?
More than that, he should be out in the world helping children like Chris learn to live with their unusual gifts. Keeping them safe from being exploited as he had been. Would she be able to persuade him to help her? To protect her son and teach him how to live with his double-edged gifts?
She felt that sense of helpless anger coalesce into determination. How dare he linger at the edge of oblivion when the PRI was threatening to take her son away, tear him from her against her will, shunt him away into some frightening institution simply because he was different…and then try to use his unusual talents for their own desires? This man, if he was indeed Teo Sandoval, had endured a similar childhood. How dare he ignore other children like him?
Time seemed to stop and the entire universe seemed to focus on this one small portion of land, man and hope. El Rayo’s beautiful hands, broad-palmed with long, narrow, tapered fingers, seemed to lay upon the mechanic’s chest, or to hover above it for hours, though Melanie found out later that the entire scenario had lasted a mere quarter turn of the clock.
Suddenly she felt a difference in the quality of the air. The low clouds continued to spray a fine mist upon the silent onlookers, the still mechanic and the dark healer, but a new element had been added, or perhaps subtracted. The air all but crackled with electricity, smelled heavily of ozone—as if lightning had struck the ground they stood on.
She could feel the tension rippling through the rough hand around her wrist, and she half suspected the man who held her had forgotten he was doing so. He, like everyone else, was watching, waiting, probably crossing his fingers for a seeming miracle or, like some of the others, against evil.
Then El Rayo gave a sigh, strangely like a groan of pain, and reeled up and backward from the mechanic. His moan was echoed by the crowd, but no one moved to assist the staggering healer. He turned blindly, stumbling over something, nearly falling, slipping on the sodden clay soil that comprised the earth in the New Mexico mountains.
Shocked by his pallor, by the blue rimming his full lips, Melanie ignored the now surrounded mechanic and involuntarily cried out and tried to reach for him. Again the hand on her wrist held her back.
“No, señora. You must not,” Pablo murmured. Not “you should not,” but, “you must not.”
“Let me go!” Melanie cried, snapping her arm away from her would-be rescuer. “He needs help!”
Unaware she was calling out in Spanish, she didn’t understand the look of amazement the attendant turned on her. Or was it something else? Something to do with her wanting to help the “healer”?
“No one can help El Rayo, señora,” he said. “I have tried for many years. It’s no use.” His voice sounded as sad as his face looked, but did he mean the man was beyond help, or that he would not allow another to lend aid?
A cry from the mechanic’s wife snared everyone’s attention and Melanie turned to see the mechanic slowly pulling himself up to his elbows. “Doro?” he asked in a sleepy voice. “What happened, Doro? Why—?”
Everyone pushed to answer him, to assist him, and in the brief distraction, Pablo released Melanie’s wrist. Without further thought, she lunged for the strange healer before he pitched into a thick scrub oak.
Wrapping her arms around his body, she eased him back against her, though his weight pulled them both to the ground. A tremendous shudder worked through his body and he half turned, instinctively seeking the comfort of her arms.
He might be weak but his gaze was as sharp as it had been earlier. And whatever residue there was of his lightning touch seemed to ripple and eddy against her skin, making the hairs on her arms rise. She felt her heartbeat accelerating and knew by the tension on his face that he could hear it, feel it throbbing against his cheek.
She told herself she was holding him as she might a child, but knew this was a patent lie. This man inspired a riot of sensation in her, but none of it was the least motherly in nature. Her mouth felt dry, her fingers against his face trembled.
His lips parted, his eyes glittered at her, a cold distance bridging an anger she couldn’t fathom.
“No one touches me,” he said harshly in English, his deep baritone rough, the words as ambiguous as the man himself. Did he mean that no one had? Or did he mean that no one should?
When she didn’t move, didn’t release him, one of his hands raised to wipe the moisture from her face. Was the moisture a product of the mist, or had she been crying? She didn’t know and with his fingers lightly tracing the curve of her cheek, she couldn’t have begun to guess.
Her heart all but thundered in her chest and she felt a strange languor seeping through her body. Was he hypnotizing her? Was his touch making her feel things she’d never even imagined, let alone experienced?
His silence and intensity frightened her. Dear God, she thought in desperation, what kind of a man was he?
“Don’t you know, señora, that one touch from me can kill?”
CHAPTER TWO
When Melanie had shaken the attendant’s hand from her arm, when she’d run to try to stem El Rayo’s fall, she’d acted out of pure impulse. He’d needed help, she had responded. But this was no pathetic, wounded man. He was all but admitting he could kill her with a single touch. And his hand upon her cheek made the message all that much more ominous.
She wanted to say something, anything, to deflect the conflicting signals in his stormy gaze. But all she could think was, He is the one. She was holding a man whose single glance could destroy an entire two-story building, had her arms wrapped around a force that could maim as easily as he apparently healed.
This was the man she’d been looking for, desperate to find, and now he was not so obliquely threatening her.
But had it been a threat or a simple statement of fact? Something told her instinctively that nothing short of total exhaustion would ever have allowed him to lie so still in her arms. Everything about her first impression of him attested to that single fact. He was a man who stood alone, apart from the rest, needing and wanting no one.
The line from the psychiatrist’s report teased her again. But at all costs, he should be left alone. Not advice, not a casual reference, but a dire warning.
However, his weight, his face against the swell of her breast, his warm breath teasing her through the thin material of her wet blouse made her certain the psychiatrist had other meanings in mind. He should be left alone. Oh, yes. He most certainly should be left alone. To touch him was to dance on the edge of a high cliff without a parachute. To feel his fingers on one’s face was to know the searing heat of a volcano and the icy plunge into a glacier lake.
Melanie swallowed heavily. She had to ask for his help now, at this moment, while his powers were at least moderately on the wane, while his internal batteries were obviously somewhat depleted. This might be her only chance because she knew from the way the townspeople had averted his gaze, had avoided hers, that they would be unlikely to aid her in finding him again. He was their mystery, their El Rayo. A miracle man of this magnitude wasn’t likely to be a subject of much discussion, and certainly wouldn’t be offered to an outsider.
“Please…” she began, only to trail off at an increase in the volume coming from the group to their left. With a great effort, she dragged her gaze from El Rayo, the man she believed—knew—to be Teo Sandoval.
Over the bulk of his shoulder she could see the crowd around the mechanic. To her further shock, the young, bloodied man was being assisted to his feet. Whatever protest she might have uttered died on her lips as the man grinned crookedly and patted his own chest. At that moment all knowledge of her Spanish eluded her and she was never certain afterward what was spoken, but watched, in wonder, as the mechanic gently hugged his openly sobbing wife and baby.
Like the others, she had seen the mechanic’s chest, had heard the gurgle of expiration from his damaged lungs. She’d heard the so-called death rattle often enough in her lifetime to have recognized it here. There had been no doubt that he would die. She’d felt it, had seen it in all the faces of the people anxiously crowding around.
She looked back down at the man in her arms with a combination of awe and fear. She knew now why the townspeople had stood back from him, had avoided his skypale eyes. She was more than a little afraid of him herself. But like the villagers in this small mountain community, she needed him.
She wished she could believe that with him so spent in her arms there was nothing to fear from him, but as if that crew of yesteryear PRI scientists surrounded her, she could sense their doubt, feel their nervousness, hear their murmurs of awe. Was it the influence of the local people, happy that their Demo lived but wary of the man who healed him, or was it something she discerned about him all on her own?
She wished she could feel empathy for him, alone with his gift, but only felt a wary sympathy instead. Something about him, locked anew in his glittering gaze, the dark liquid halo of hair touching her, made Melanie feel that she had dived into a crystal-clear lake and discovered, too late, that it was truly crystal, not water at all. There was something terribly sharp and hard about him, no matter how helpless he might now appear.
He studied her for all the world as if she were the anomaly, as if she were the cause of the commotion beyond them.
“You’re very foolish, señora,” he said.
She agreed with him absolutely. But desperation bred foolishness…and heroics. And she didn’t believe he was calling her silly or inept, but was speaking from dark knowledge, from some untold need to warn her away.
She heard someone ask another how she could be touching El Rayo. Until that moment she hadn’t stopped to truly consider what she’d witnessed. Not one person had touched him, most had even avoided his gaze. He had touched the mechanic, not the other way around. Was this what the attendant had meant when he’d uttered, “You must not,” and held her away from the reeling Teo Sandoval?
On some dim level, not overriding the mesmerizing quality of his gaze but augmenting it somehow, she was half aware of the looks of awe the townspeople were leveling at her. Had none of them ever touched the man? She wanted to open her mind again, catch reasons, rationales, but the power of the man in her arms kept her from lowering that guard.
“Please…” she said again, but wasn’t certain what she was asking of him now. She was too conscious of his warm face against her wet blouse, his hand dropping from her own overwarm cheeks.
She thought of Chris, of how his own father had shrunk away from him in fear, of how baby-sitters had fled the house in terror, of how even the scientists at the PRI had touched Chris only when wearing lead-lined gloves. She had been the only one who wasn’t afraid of Chris, had been the only one to openly give him the small assurances that he was lovable and loved.
Was this man in her arms only a taller, adult version of her son? Perhaps once, long ago. But no longer. Melanie shivered in recognition of the differences. Teo Sandoval was nothing like Chris. Her son had yet to enter life, this man had slammed the door on the outside world. Her son’s tiny fingers made objects dance in the air, this man’s touch either cured or destroyed. Shining light or utter darkness, both sides warred inside this man’s soul. Pray God, Chris never knew such contrasts.
She tried calling on whatever mild powers she herself possessed to reach into the future and see the outcome of this meeting, but with her mind so firmly closed to the man in her arms, her inner crystal ball remained cloudy, indistinct. Then his eyes narrowed in part suspicion, part confusion and she recognized him from her dreams, the same dreams that had led her to this misty mountain and to this man. She recognized his face from the PRI photographs and from her nightmares, the ones that left her choking on tears, the sound of her own screams ringing in her ears.
As if hating what he was seeing, he turned his face abruptly, pressing tightly against her breasts. His hand gripped her shoulder in a rough, nearly painful grip. As vulnerable as he might seem, drained by this unusual healing, Melanie didn’t consider him an object of pity. His power, the strange magic within him, might be quiescent, but she knew it was a momentary, fleeting circumstance. It would be back. And when it came, it would be strong enough to demolish his surroundings…or save a man’s life.
He opened his eyes and met hers. Again she had the fleeting impression of a lone timber wolf. And like the lone wolf, the message in his eyes was definitive. I stand alone…that which comes near me comes in peril.
No gratitude radiated from his eyes, no measure of relief. The only thing she could read was raw distrust. There were other things there, as well, but they were darker, rougher, too frightening to contemplate.
He shivered as if fevered, and suddenly, as if by virtue of having moved, his energy sources seemed replenished. Now his body felt overwarm against hers, making her uncomfortably aware of the intimacy of their embrace. His eyes never wavered from hers and this added to her unease. He wasn’t searching her eyes or her face for answers, was instead staring at her in complete rejection.
For a moment she had the fanciful notion that he stared at her as a creature of the wild would. A creature that was trapped in the piercing beam of a pair of headlights, with an almost weary acceptance of doom, of a fate gone so far awry as to announce certain death. She wished she didn’t recognize the look, but she did. She’d seen it in the mirror of yet another cheap hotel room just this morning. She’d seen it yesterday, last week, a month ago, and all too often since the first day Chris had made the toys on the windowsill dance for his dumbfounded parents.
But Teo Sandoval wasn’t like Chris. Shaking her head slightly to rid herself of the mere thought, Melanie took a shaky breath. His eyelids lowered slightly, dangerously, and any thought she’d had of any similarity vanished. He didn’t look trapped, only supremely cautious and prepared. Deadly.
He didn’t move, didn’t so much as shift, but she was suddenly wholly conscious of the fact that the only thing preventing him from rising to his feet were her two arms wrapped around him. But she couldn’t seem to let him go. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, she did; her arms were numb, as though they’d fallen asleep, though she knew that had to be impossible. What was he doing to her? Or was she doing something to herself, the need she harbored for his help making certain that she wouldn’t let him slip away?
He slowly raised a dark, strong hand. The palms of his hands were broad, and the fingers long and tapered, marred by large, slightly irregular knuckles. They could have been the hands of a sculptor…or a murderer, she didn’t care. All she knew was that they held the power of the universe in them. She’d seen the photographs of the destruction he’d caused with a single wave of those hands. And now she’d seen evidence of that power with her own eyes, she was captivated…and terrified of what his touch would do to her.
She willed herself to push away from him, to pull back, but couldn’t seem to move. Somehow she could sense the violent emotion in him, and it frightened her. Then, just as she thought she’d cry out, his hand reached for her. But instead of touching her face again, as she’d more than half expected, he lifted a wet strand of her hair. He caressed the strand with his fingers, as if memorizing its texture, staring at it as if it were some great enigma.
Her heart was pounding so loudly, so furiously, she was certain he would be able to hear it, if not feel it.
He studied her hair, almost as though mesmerized by it, then slowly transferred his gaze to her own widely opened eyes. Then he gave a rather sharp tug to the hair in his grasp.
“You are very foolish, señora,” he repeated. His voice was still slightly raspy, and Melanie suspected the reason why. The harshness had nothing to do with a lack of language skills but was, rather, because he seldom spoke.
Something in his tone, in his rough touch sent a spark of fire through her. Again she had the sensation that the two of them seemed to be alone on this hillside, far away from all humanity. She was suddenly and deeply aware of this strange man’s sheer masculinity and, by contrast, her own femininity. Her lips parted in wonder at the feeling. How long had it been since she’d felt anything like this? More than a year? More than two or three, perhaps. Since Chris had been born probably, and possibly even before that.
Part of her wanted to reach up and cover this healer’s hand with her own. Growing inside of her was a desire for affirmation, need to show him she understood a want he hadn’t voiced. But before she could speak, his hand dropped her hair and came to rest on his chest. Melanie swallowed, tasting an odd disappointment. Such raw power he held in those lax fingers, yet all he’d done was touch her face, hold a single, wet lock of her hair—
“Let me go,” he said. Though his voice was nearly a whisper, the command was as sharp and clear as a clarion.
Slowly, almost painfully, she unlocked her arms, setting him free. She refused to meet his eyes. To do so was to drown in his abject aloneness, that cold, crystalline rejection. To linger there was to willingly submit to what she knew was his double-edged power—the gift of life or the capability of total destruction.
But he remained motionless, didn’t pull away from her. And now that she was no longer holding him, the intimacy of their positions seemed all the greater, for his head still pressed against her breasts, his body still curved against hers.
As if in rescue, she heard the distant whine of sirens. It was probably the sheriff and ambulance the abuelito had called earlier, which raised another set of questions. Would Teo Sandoval stay long enough to hear her request? After meeting his eyes, touching him, did she even dare ask it of him now?
“Quickly, El Rayo…you must go now,” Pablo said. “The sheriff comes. People. You have to go now. Johnny’s only a mile from here, maybe less. If you don’t wish them to see you, you have to hurry. ¡Andale!”
The other man motioned for Teo to rise, but made no move to help him. In fact, he kept his eyes studiously averted. Melanie saw a look of pure hatred cross Teo Sandoval’s face and recoiled from it even though it wasn’t directed at her but at the attendant who had spoken.
His muscles rippled and contracted and Melanie bit her lip against the visceral reaction the motion inspired in her. She saw Teo give Pablo a cold, measured look that seemed to contain some dreadful message, and shivered inwardly. She hoped she would never live to receive such a baleful glare.
“Let him go, señora. It’s no favor to keep him here,” Pablo continued. Melanie’s brow furrowed. Even to her still dazed mind, the man no longer had the look of a backward, poverty-stricken gas station owner, but instead seemed to have something of Teo Sandoval’s strong, potentially threatening aura about him.
“I’m not stopping him,” Melanie said, and even to herself her voice sounded hoarse and taut with tension. She allowed her hands to slide away from him, to the cold, wet ground where the mud felt slimy and slick after the roughness of his shirt, the warmth of his body.
In a swift, powerful stretch, Teo silently pushed to his feet and, after a moment’s hesitation and a slight sway to the right, turned as though to leave. For a dismaying moment Melanie thought he would disappear without a word, and wondered if perhaps the man was like an idiot savant, capable of incredible feats but not “fully there.” The PRI files hadn’t indicated anything like that, and yet the scientists had deemed him a barbarian. Her mind hotly denied the idiot savant possibility, and without conscious decision, she called out in protest.
“Teo!”
He stopped as if shot, and turned back to look down at her. Though she felt none of that soul-shattering connection that had gripped her earlier, she was all too aware of an inordinant amount of relief at the look of wariness, of cold intelligence, in his eyes. She found herself holding her breath.
“Who are you?” he asked. His voice was still rough and scratchy. And this, too, inexplicably served to ease her confused mind. He wasn’t wholly recovered, and therefore had to be human, after all. His eyes darkened as he waited for her answer.
She told him her name and he nodded slowly, as if he had expected her to say Melanie Daniels.
Pablo muttered something, but trailed off when Teo turned his silver-blue gaze in his direction. The attendant shrugged and looked away uncomfortably, shoving his hands into his pockets.
Teo’s eyes were narrowed as he switched his gaze back to her. “How do you know my name?”
Melanie could see a wealth of wariness on his face and noted that his entire frame seemed a testimonial to that tension. She knew, by his question, that her earlier suspicions that he didn’t wish to be found were accurate. Teo Sandoval. The one man who could possibly help her son. This was him. Until this moment she hadn’t let herself truly believe it. But it was true. She’d found him. He had to help her, but instinctively she knew she would have to tread very carefully.
He was still waiting for an answer to his terse question. Melanie drew a shallow breath. Was he telepathic, as well? Her mind was closed to him, certainly—she had been able to close it at will since childhood, even though it opened alarmingly easily in sleep—so he couldn’t be reading her thoughts. But was it possible that he could read deeper than mere surface thoughts, perhaps pluck the truth from her subconscious?
“I—I heard about you. I read about you in the f-files at the Psionic Research Institute.”
If she’d expected him to look shocked or even recoil in some exaggerated rendition of horror, she would have been disappointed; he did neither. He merely stared at her with the cold flat expression she was coming to associate with him.
“I need your help,” she said finally.
Something flickered in his eyes at that, but his facial features didn’t shift an iota.
“My son…he…”
“I help no one,” Teo rasped.
“But…the mechanic?”
Teo waved a hand dismissively, but didn’t try to correct his obvious falsehood or to explain away the contradiction.
“Please…” she murmured, staring up at him, blinking away the sudden sting in her eyes. “You have to help me.” She wasn’t surprised that her voice sounded as hoarse as his.
“No.”
“I can pay. I’ll pay you anything,” she said, knowing even as she said it that it wouldn’t help, wouldn’t matter. The amount of money he’d gained control of years ago, money in an account established by the PRI, was enough for anyone’s needs. More than that, however, was the fact that anyone able to survive in the wilds of the New Mexico mountains—alone—for so long couldn’t have much interest in material objects.
Something flickered in his gaze. “If you know what’s good for you, señora, you’ll leave now. Women don’t travel alone in these mountains,” he said softly, his tone far from kindly.
“Please…I’ll pay anything,” she repeated desperately, hoping the words could be heard over the painful pounding of her heart. She tried pushing to her feet, but her hands only slid in the mud and she merely scooted forward an inch or two.
“Señora,” he said, a dangerous light now in his eyes. “Your money means nothing to me.”
The silence left in the wake of his words was torn by the shrill pulse of the sirens’ screams. Melanie jumped and automatically turned to watch the arrival of a brown Bronco bearing a sheriff’s silver star on the side panel. It whipped into the muddy gas station lanes. Not twenty yards behind the Bronco was a large, white ambulance with red lights whirling angrily in the gathering afternoon dusk.
She turned back and was too late: Teo Sandoval—El Rayo—was gone, having disappeared as thoroughly as if he’d never been there. She frantically sought his solid figure among the shadows of the surrounding forest, but saw nothing save pine boughs, sodden scrub oak and dark, dark shimmers of raindrops winking at her as though in amusement.
The unmistakable sound of tires losing their grip in mud called her attention and she turned just in time to see the sheriff’s mud-spattered unit spin across the gas station driveway. By yet another miracle on this peculiar day, the unit avoided slamming into anything, but did serve as a sharp reminder that she’d left her son alone in the car. With a single backward glance toward the seemingly empty woods, she awkwardly pushed to her feet and made her way to Chris.
In the pandemonium that reigned upon the sheriff’s arrival, and the ambulance driver’s frantic attempt to avoid collision with the sheriff’s Bronco, Melanie realized that Teo Sandoval had been allowed to fade from sight. Amid the explanations of why the sheriff had been called—a call Pablo now said apologetically had proved unnecessary—Melanie noticed that no one mentioned El Rayo. It was as if he didn’t exist.
She listened to all the explanations and the carefully worded evasions, and with one eye on Chris—who, thankfully, was now asleep and therefore unable to maintain his dancing game—searched the woods across the road for any sign of the most powerful telekinetic on record.
She wouldn’t betray El Rayo by asking the voluble townspeople about him in front of the sheriff, but she intended to stay where she was until she could ask where the healer had gone. She also preferred to be the one to approach the villagers rather than have any of them get close enough to the car that they might wake Chris and witness his amazing bag of tricks.
Wiping as much mud as possible from her clothing and hands, she waited quietly until the furor had lessened somewhat. Then, with one last reassuring glance at her son, she walked around the building.
Despite the gathering darkness, the evening shadows, Teo could see the woman clearly. He watched her round the corner and rejoin the fringe of the group surrounding Demo. She was covered in mud and her hair was sodden from the rain. But there was nothing amusing about her. Nothing at all.
His gaze remained on her, and he willed her to look his way, to find him in the shadows. He’d seen her looking before, trying, squinting her remarkable eyes against the mist, questing for him. Though he’d felt the shock of her gaze sweeping the branches beside him, around him, seemingly right at him, she hadn’t spotted him, had stared through him as though he were invisible. Her gaze had merely traveled on, taking in the oak, the red and shriveled leaves, the wet shadows surrounding him.
Why couldn’t he read her? Why couldn’t he hear this woman’s thoughts, feel her wants, needs, and the thousand other confused little memories, impressions and dreams that seemed to bombard him from everyone else in the world?
Without even trying, he could “hear” everyone standing around Pablo’s gas station. Demo was filled with pride over being the object of everyone’s attention. Tempering that pride was a heavy dose of relief, not that he had survived the car falling on him, but that he had lived through El Rayo’s touch of lightning. Doro, his wife, was thinking of the pot of frijoles she’d left on the stove when the men had first called that Demo had been hurt. Were the beans burned? Did they need salt, more chili? The baby’s diapers were wet and his nose itched. Jaime was wondering who the new señora was and if she would talk about Teo, about what she had seen. And then there was Pablo, the hardest to read of all of them. His thoughts were half closed, gifts like Teo’s twisting the thoughts into chaos. Pablo was hoping, as he always did, that he would live long enough to be forgiven an afternoon’s trip many, many years ago.
But Teo couldn’t read her at all. Not even a glimmer of her mind was revealed to him. It both frightened and intrigued him, because, for a startlingly clear moment, he had been reaching for her thoughts. Then she had shut him out. He’d felt a distinctive mental slam. It still echoed inside him. Yet before she had slammed the door on his probing, for a few charged seconds he’d seen something in her that he’d never encountered before.
An intangible something, almost like a daydream. And it rocked him to his core, for that intangible something had seemed all too like a promise of hope or connection. But he knew all too well that promises only led to despair and pain—
He shook his head in anger. Damn this woman. Who was she? What did she want? The only other time he’d felt blocked from someone’s thoughts had been at the PRI, and then only because the men in the lab coats had stood behind leaded glass and lead-lined doors. But there hadn’t been any intangibles there, only fear, hatred, need and furious control.
She had touched him. She had held him in her arms, moved the hair on his brow, smoothed the rain from his cheeks. Her fingers had been warm and soft, not healing hands such as his were, yet oddly remedial in their very presence.
Why had she helped him? Was it because she didn’t know his terrible curse? But she had to have known. She had called him by his name. His name. How long had it been since he had been held, even in sympathy? How long had it been since he had heard his name upon a woman’s lips?
She had said something about the PRI. She seemed afraid of it. She had damn good reason to be; if the PRI wanted her, they would succeed. Or had he misunderstood…and she was from the PRI?
He wanted to scream out in anger, lash out in denial. No. It couldn’t be. Yet, wasn’t he weak from the healing? He might have been too weakened from the healing to recognize all the dangers today. He fought the rage building in his lungs, the pain boiling in his heart.
God, he thought, and then stopped. No amount of prayer would help him. It never had, it never would.
He cursed her silently for ever coming to Loco Suerte. She was too damn beautiful and, though he knew nothing more of her than her name, and perhaps a measure of her desperation, he was too attracted to her. She’d stripped him naked not only with her gentle embrace, but by the very fact that she’d touched him at all. He ached for more and, though he knew it was irrational, hated her for that, for making him want her…for making him remember that for him there was to be no touching, no love, no life. Ever.
A host of questions clamored in his mind like the raucous calls of piñon jays in winter, and slowly answers coalesced. She wasn’t from the PRI, but she wanted him to help her son. She would pay anything, she’d said, but he’d told her to leave. And he’d meant it. It was far too dangerous for her to stay. Too dangerous for him.
His thoughts turned to her son and his gaze followed their direction. The child was no more than a babe and was asleep, dreaming of his mother and a host of simple, nothing thoughts.
As if recognizing the intrusive stranger even in his dreams, the small child sat up suddenly and, standing on tiptoe, peered through the rain-streaked rear window. Unlike his mother, the boy located Teo easily. Honey-brown eyes, totally unlike his mother’s deep green, stared from a baby’s rounded features. They were old beyond his years, yet the child still remained an innocent. A small hand raised and fingers waggled in Teo’s direction.
Unconsciously, Teo smiled in response. The simple gesture felt foreign on his lips, crooked somehow. He felt something shift deep inside him, a shaft of pain that somehow transcended the pain he felt whenever he healed or even the joy of making the universe move to his will.
Watch.
He heard the child’s clear command. The smile faded from Teo’s lips as the unfamiliar touch settled in his mind, possibly in his soul. It was cool and light against his senses, but clear nonetheless, and knowing. The boy had known he could talk with him, mind to mind. How?
Watch me!
The little fingers wiggled again, but this time Teo knew it was no wave, but another command. Various objects in the car—a pen, a comb, a red ball, some kind of little man doll and other things—suddenly began to bob around the back seat.
The shaft of pain that had shot through him earlier returned, except this time it twisted, driving the hurt deeper, wrenching at him. The boy was like him, could have been a blond version of himself at that age. The child, her child, was another of the damned.
Then, like his mother’s had before him, the child’s mind suddenly closed to Teo, and a barrier he couldn’t penetrate was welded across the small head.
It was then he understood exactly what the woman wanted of him. And he knew he could help her, but knew he wouldn’t dare. If he spent any time at all with the child, with the mother, he would not survive. Some small, locked away part of him would finally die, because even a moment in their company and he would surely be overwhelmed by painful memories, longing for things he couldn’t have. He would be reminded of far too many broken promises and shattered dreams.
He pressed a question to the boy, but the child didn’t respond. Teo understood the boy like he couldn’t the mother. The child was concentrating on making things “dance” and while he did so, he was blocked to all other influences. He, too, had done that once. But only as a small child.
He could remember the peace, the sense of blessed quiet that came with that kind of focused thought, and longed for it still.
Two people who could block him in one day? Yet, weren’t they mother and child?
He heard her tension-stretched voice in his mind, “I’ll pay anything.” What if—
He angrily lashed out at the sodden scrub oak before him. He couldn’t afford to finish the thought. Wondering was for fools and innocents. He’d made his path, and damn her for making him even doubt the certainty of his need to be alone.
She shouldn’t have asked him. She shouldn’t have come here with her satin-soft hair and her green eyes that brimmed with tears and pain. And she shouldn’t have brought that child who even now made his world spin with no more effort than another little boy might send a small top careening across a linoleum floor.
Yet a part of him wanted to say yes to her plea. That part wanted to tell her that he would help her, would help the boy. And another part hated her for making him feel this foreign and long, long buried want.
He was right to deny her cry for help. He didn’t need to add any grief to his life; he deserved his hard-won peace. He deserved the solitude he’d fought to achieve. A child such as he had once been, a woman who wasn’t afraid to touch him…both would conspire to shatter that peace, to erode his fragile hold on control.
He could feel that control slipping now, could feel the electricity building in him, aching for release. His heart beat too fast, his chest rose and fell with each ragged, shallow breath he took. His fingers still felt the silk of her hair, his nostrils conjured her scent, and his body trembled with the need to hold the power inside him. Damn her.
“No,” he murmured roughly, denying the need within. But the electricity didn’t subside, it only gathered strength.
With a growl of rage, he turned and crashed into the woods, needing to get as far and as fast away from the woman and her son as he possibly could.
A branch struck his cheek and he cursed softly, groaning in a mixture of anger, hurt and sharp, anguished want. The sky above him exploded in lightning, answering his pain. Blue and jagged, the bolt rent the sky, suffusing his face, reflecting, he knew, the fury in his eyes.
The crack of thunder that followed nearly deafened him, but he didn’t slow his raging race up the mountain. Then another streak of fire shot across the sky, followed by another deafening clap of thunder. His chest heaved and he shook with the effort to keep his emotions under control. But the storm raging around and above him was proof that he’d failed.
The sheriff, Johnny someone, turned to Melanie with an expression that told her clearly he considered her at fault for having been on the scene of an accident in his district.
“Did you see the car fall on Demo Aguilar?”
She felt rather than heard the collective holding of breaths.
“No, I was beside my car. I only heard it fall. Heard him scream. Then everything happened so fast,” she said casually.
She could tell the townspeople suffered the tension of waiting for her to expose what had really happened, to reveal the presence of one healer—destroyer—named El Rayo, who carried the force of lightning in his hands. They hadn’t helped him, but neither did they want the sheriff to know he had been there. She didn’t have to ask why; she knew the answer. Teo wanted it that way.
“She was buying gas when the Chevy fell off her jack onto Demo,” the elder of the two checker players said.
“The Chevy was on your jack?” Johnny asked, his bushy eyebrows pushing upward.
“No, no, Señor Sheriff,” Pablo corrected. “It was the jack of Demo’s, but she broke.”
Melanie looked at the attendant with new respect. This broken, ignorant speech routine was an act. She’d heard him speaking perfectly understandable English just a few minutes’ earlier.
“The car, she fell on Demo. We thought he was dead. That was when we called you. But the car, she didn’t kill him. No. See for yourself. We lifted it off him. Now he is fine!”
The crowd murmured assent and pushed Demo forward to show the sheriff the faint remains of his once near-fatal wounds. Melanie was struck by how adroitly Pablo had turned the sheriff’s attention from her. The townspeople obviously wanted no mention of El Rayo to reach the sheriff’s ears. If it weren’t for the warning she could read in almost every pair of eyes, she might have wondered if she hadn’t imagined the entire episode.
But it had been real. And what she had seen in Teo’s eyes and had felt in his touch had also been real. Too disturbingly real. If they didn’t want her to talk about him, she would play along, but they couldn’t stop her from talking to him.
The sheriff wrapped up his futile investigation a few minutes’ later and departed into the early night amid much good-natured assistance from the men in the crowd, who helped him extricate his vehicle from the mud.
Melanie was about to ask Pablo for help regarding locating Teo Sandoval when she happened to catch a glimpse of her son in the back seat of her rented Buick. His entire entourage of movable objects was bouncing around the interior of the car like a mobile without strings, like leaves snared by a whirlwind.
She ran to the car and tried opening the back door. It was locked. She called to Chris, but he didn’t hear her; he never did when he played this way. Another thing to thank the PRI for, she thought as she wrenched open the driver’s door and lunged over the back seat to grab his shoulder. He started and turned, a sunny smile lighting his lips. Objects fell like heavy rain, clattering on the dash, the seats, the steering wheel.
“Chris, honey. Please don’t dance anything for a minute, okay? Try very hard. Listen to me. People are here. Don’t dance. Okay?”
Chris shook his head solemnly. “No dance.”
“That’s right. No dance.”
She backed out of the car, keeping a finger pointed at Chris to reinforce her point. She knew the gesture was largely in vain, for like any three-year-old, memory was only a vague dream and soon he would be lured into the delight of making the items move once more. As always, she knew she could punish him to make him remember to refrain from making things dance, but that seemed the ultimate of cruelties, to punish a child for what came most naturally. It would have been like punishing Mozart for writing a symphony or Einstein for fiddling with physics.
She quickly surveyed the group rounding the gas station corner. They were looking at her curiously, but not with undue questions; they had apparently only seen her race for her car and were now watching her with anticipation for her next unusual move.
All except Pablo. He had seen Chris, had seen the bobbing objects. She recognized the fact in his wide, fearful eyes, in the hand hidden behind his back, no doubt making the finger-and-thumb sign against evil.
“No dance, Chris,” she murmured, still holding her finger up in the air. “Don’t you dare dance now.”
Suddenly lightning rent the blackening sky, blinding her, turning the universe into a jagged gash of blue and red. A monstrous clap of thunder followed before she could even catch her breath. As if the sky itself were angry, huge drops of water pummeled the ground and the people standing numbly in the already sodden driveway of Loco Suerte’s gas station.
When Melanie’s eyes cleared, she saw that as one, the group had huddled together and were now swiftly clearing the area. Within seconds, for the first time since the metal-crunching crash, the place seemed as deserted as when Melanie had first arrived. Again, except for the gas station attendant.
He remained where he’d been before the lightning and thunder. His eyes were on the inside of her car. On Chris.
“You have to help me,” she said urgently.
He turned his eyes toward her. She couldn’t quite read the expression on his face, but instinctively knew it wasn’t unpleasant or even fearful. If anything, she thought she detected sorrow there. She lowered her guard a notch and found she was right. But she didn’t dare relax her protective walls long enough to probe deeply into the reasons for the sorrow. Teo Sandoval was out there somewhere, and she was all too likely to unconsciously seek and link with his mind. And this would be too dangerous now, he’d read the strange feelings she was already harboring about him.
“Just tell me where I can find him,” she said. When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Teo Sandoval, can help me with my—”
“He’s like Teo was,” Pablo interupted quietly, lifting his chin in the direction of the car, and the child inside. “When he was a boy, Teo was like that. God, how I remember.”
Whatever it was he remembered, it wasn’t pleasant, nor was it a comfortable memory. As if Teo were there now, and angry over being discussed, the sky again exploded in light and sound.
“Then you can see I need his help,” Melanie said. She felt tears welling in her eyes. The sudden thunderstorm was frightening and she’d come too far, been searching too long. She felt she had no reserves left. “Please, tell me how to find him. Please help me.”
The attendant looked over his shoulder at the dark, rain-drenched woods, and then back to her. Even through the rain she could sense his indecision, his worry.
“I won’t tell anyone about him,” she said urgently.
“I wasn’t thinking that, señora,” he said.
“Please…”
“Those people that took Teo all that time ago. They hurt him badly, I think. He never talks about it.”
“They are the same people that want my son,” Melanie said quickly, holding back a sob.
“Are they following you?” he asked quietly.
Melanie suddenly realized where his questions were leading. “No,” she said. It was a half lie. They were following her, but according to her prescient dreams, they hadn’t found her yet.
Pablo looked at her for a long moment, perhaps attempting to weigh her words for their truth.
She added urgently, “They want my son. They want to use him, just like they did Teo.” Even to herself, her voice sounded desperate, confused. She took a deep breath and added fervently, “But Chris is only a baby.”
“He’ll refuse you,” Pablo said flatly.
“But he knows what those scientists will do to Chris,” Melanie blurted out, as if by convincing this man, she could persuade Teo Sandoval.
“Perhaps that’s why he’ll refuse,” the attendant answered obliquely. “The niño will remind him. Of too many things.”
“But he can’t just let them take Chris from me. He, of all people, knows what will happen,” she protested.
Pablo looked back at the car, his dark eyes penetrating the even darker interior. He looked more miserable than ever. Melanie held her breath as he studied Chris.
Finally he sighed heavily, muttered something in Spanish beneath his breath, and said, “Go one mile down the highway—” he jutted his chin in the direction Melanie had originally been heading “—and then turn left onto the dirt road. You won’t be able to go all the way in that car. You will have to walk. You and…your child.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.” She swiftly strapped Chris into the back seat, and locked and shut the back door. She had turned and already started to get into the car when she remembered that she hadn’t yet paid him for the gasoline. Dragging her purse over, she started to pull out some dollar bills.
The attendant waved her offering away and stepped back beneath the canting portal. “De nada,” he said, then added in English, “For nothing. You touched him. For that, I think I would pay you.”
“Thank you—” Melanie began, but Pablo held up one mud-and grease-stained hand.
“Trust me, señora, you should not thank me.”
Melanie, too dazed by the day’s events, the furious storm overhead, and with the end of her quest in sight, only put the car in gear and steered to the narrow highway.
When she glanced into the rearview mirror, she saw Chris and his dancing toys. And beyond him, standing in the furious rain, the gas station attendant. He was back there, watching her slow progress up the mountain.
Just before she rounded a curve that would cut him from view, she saw him cross himself and look up at the flashes of lightning zigzagging across the night sky.
Was he praying that Teo Sandoval wouldn’t enact retribution on him for telling her how to find him?
Or was he praying for her?
CHAPTER THREE
The sky flared as lightning bull-whipped across the sky and the resultant thunder sounded like the drums of fate, deep and heavy, reverberating with promise…or threat.
The rental Buick slid sideways and despite Melanie’s frantic attempts to correct the spin by turning the wheel in the opposite direction, it continued its revolution. She felt low brush scraping the side of the car, scratching it but also cushioning it, preventing it from going any farther afield. Almost luckily, the car died.
For a dazed moment Melanie found herself still trying to turn the wheel, still trying to see through the sheet of oppressive rain to the narrow track that made up the road to Teo Sandoval’s hideaway. When she finally realized the car wasn’t moving, that the only sounds she could hear were the rain, wind and total silence of the Buick, she had to fight the desire to simply sink onto the seat and cry herself to sleep.
But she couldn’t allow herself that luxury. If she fell asleep now, she felt she might never wake up. Her one hope was somewhere up that road and no amount of rain, thunder or even dark, possibly animal-laden, woods was going to prevent her from attempting to enlist his aid. Surely he would turn them back out into the night, into a raging thunderstorm. Reclusive he might be, but surely not inhumane.
If she told herself that often enough, she thought, she might actually start to believe it. Especially if she ignored the utter rejection and wariness she’d read in his eyes, the tension rippling through his broad shoulders. And if she forced herself to forget the photographs of the PRI’s demolished building, the stark recommendation of the PRI psychiatrist that Teo Sandoval be left alone at all costs.
Taking a deep breath, she gathered Chris from the back seat, fastening him in his waterproof coat and hood. As luck would have it, by the time she managed to drag on her own light parka, the furious rain had abated to a fine drizzle, although the sharp, angry wind whipping the tall pines to creaking protest sent what rain there was directly into her eyes.
She held Chris against her shoulder with one hand and tried focusing the flashlight on the muddy road with the other.
“Hold on to me, Chris,” she said, hitching him higher.
“Dance, Mommy,” Chris chirruped.
Melanie knew he meant he wanted his toys to accompany them, but she wished he could make her dance right then, make them both as seemingly weightless as his ever-present entourage of floating objects. Her son had never seemed heavier than at this moment with her feet slithering in the mud, her body shaking from cold and exhaustion.
But at least one of them could mentally escape the arduous trek. “Okay, honey. Dance all you want,” she said wearily.
Another flash of lightning blinded her momentarily, but it seemed farther away now, higher up the mountain. Unfortunately, that was exactly where she was heading. She paused for a moment, catching her breath, and shifted Chris to her other arm.
Even in the dark, she could see his toys in the air right in front of them, unaffected by the wind or the drizzle. Chris’s entire focus was on them, rendering him blissfully oblivious to the discomforts of their journey up the mountain. She reflected, not for the first time, that in many ways the PRI had given him a precious gift, that while they may have been frustrated and angered by his ability to close them out, his complete concentration was more a blessing than a detriment. It spared him what his mother couldn’t escape.
She resumed her difficult hike, and soon had fallen into a shambling rhythm, thinking not of the man up ahead, not daring to hope he could be persuaded to help her son—and her. Instead she found herself remembering the early days at the PRI, the lavish meals, the hushed and awed voices of the scientists. Those days had been bright with hope, tense with anticipation. They had also been before she’d discovered the murderous intentions behind their every gift.
Then her thoughts drifted to her former husband, and she again remembered the look on Tom’s face when he’d fled from her, from Chris and his unruly powers. The oddly definite final glance he’d shot her as he’d accepted the payment for revealing Chris’s unusual nature to the driven scientists, for signing away his half of their custodial rights.
She had blamed him bitterly when he’d left them two years ago, had hated him when she saw that cowardly defiance in his greedy face. But she’d never despised him as much as she did at this particular moment, trudging up a muddy hillside in the dark. On the run from the men to whom he’d nearly succeeded in selling his son.
But the two weeks of desperately seeking Teo Sandoval had helped to blur Tom’s features, crystallize his personality. She knew now that he’d always been a runner, fleeing at the first sign of difficulty, quitting jobs that were too demanding, leaving towns that seemed too judgmental. Though she hadn’t known it until long after they’d been married he’d abandoned his first wife and daughter, so was it all that surprising that he would turn tail and run at the first sign of Chris’s stringless mobile? And how could she not have expected a man who constantly sought get-rich-quick schemes to eventually try to sell his own flesh and blood for the proverbial handful of silver?
Nonetheless, she still felt the deep pain of the betrayal just as she’d felt it when Tom had left. Then, she’d only considered the abrupt cessation of sharing responsibilities, decisions. But now, thanks to him, she was trekking up a backwoods mountain road that had been turned to sliding mud by a freak prewinter rain and seeking aid from a man who could destroy as easily as he could help her, from a man who had already told her to leave, whose eyes had underscored the dangers he’d warned her about.
For a brief moment exhaustion overcame her and she stopped, considering turning back, running elsewhere, seeking asylum in some far away region. But then she smiled bitterly. No place was far enough from the PRI to be truly safe. If they could track her by no other means, they would use their stable of psychics to find her. Chris’s mother knew too much about them. She suspected even more. They couldn’t let her escape and possibly expose them. Her dreams, while perplexing, still revealed enough for her to understand that their conceived end justified any means. And those dreams told her clearly that the PRI would stop at nothing, because no one—with the possible exception of Teo Sandoval—was as powerful a telekinetic as her son. They wanted him, and would do whatever it took to get him.
She shivered, thinking of how they would pervert Chris’s innocent dancing abilities. She heard a crackling rustle in the nearby trees and swiftly darted the flashlight over the brush on her left. She saw no animal, no human, but the light wildly strafing the tree branches, the low scrub oak, somehow frightened her. It clearly revealed how terribly alone she was on this muddy road, how utterly defenseless.
Startled into action, she continued her journey. Half running, trying desperately not to slip and fall in the cold mud, and clinging to Chris with all her might, Melanie staggered up the rough trail, not even bothering to try to use her flashlight as a guide.
She was almost stunned when she realized she was no longer running nearly straight uphill, but had leveled out some twenty feet ago. She had reached the apex of the mountain and now stood in a huge, broad, night-darkened clearing.
No house broke the line of her vision, and tall, imposing cliffs rose high above an inky black horizon. The black could only mean one thing: the land dropped off sharply. She and her son were standing on what felt like the very edge of the world. Beyond the clearing on her left were a series of small, craggy hills that dropped sharply, leveling out to form the cliff edge. And judging by the width of the black strip, the cliff hovered above an abyss that might cut through the very heart of these mountains.
Had the gas station attendant knowingly sent a woman and baby to a wrong location? Was he, even now, behind her on that treacherous road somewhere? Or had she taken a wrong turn, gone right instead of left? Surely he’d said take the first dirt road to her left?
Tears of frustration, fear and abject despair stung her eyes. She blinked them back determindly. If she started crying now, she might never stop.
Just then lightning arrowed across the sky and illuminated the clearing, revealing the harsh face of the rock wall beyond the abyss, and the craggy hills facing her. Incredibly, the lightning also revealed a pair of massive wooden doors set into the lowest of the rocky hills that descended to the cliff edge.
Dear God, she thought. He lives in a cave?
Small flashes of lightning continued to flicker from behind heavy clouds, lighting the clearing with red, gold and blue flares. And still Melanie stood staring at the imposing set of doors, the narrow portal that stretched in front of them.
She looked back over her shoulder at the dark, muddy road she’d traversed to get to this spot. It looked even more imposing and dangerous from this vantage point than it had coming up.
Drawing a deep breath of the misting air, she told herself that she’d come this far, she wasn’t about to turn back now. She needed Teo Sandoval’s help. And nothing was going to make her leave without pleading her case before him. Nothing.
She straightened her aching shoulders, ignored her icy-cold and muddy feet, and pushed her sodden hair from her face. Crossing the twenty or thirty yards leading to the set of wooden doors, she knew how Puss ‘N Boots must have felt, or Beauty upon reaching the Beast’s castle—utterly terrified and equally determined not to show it.
All too quickly Melanie reached the narrow portal heralding the doors. She stepped up two wooden steps and crossed the rough planking after pausing to scrape some of the mud from her shoes. Chris’s toys stayed in midair at her side, as unaffected as ever by Melanie’s tension, the wind, the misting rain or the lightning. Would the sight of the toys affect Teo Sandoval’s decision to help her? Or would it make him even more determined that she leave without his aid?
She hiked Chris up and closer, tucking him securely beneath her head, cradling him, as much for her own security as his. Then she rapped on the massive doors. Her knuckles against the heavy wood made about as much noise as a whisper in a crowded room.
Using the flat edge of her fist, she pounded the door in a repeated series of three loud bangs. No one answered. Teo Sandoval didn’t appear. She waited for a few seconds, then redoubled her efforts. Still no answer.
She stood irresolutely for about a minute, not knowing what to do. She had focused so thoroughly on the trek to get here that she’d never once considered what she would do if he was either not at home or refused to answer his door. If, indeed, this even proved to be his home.
On the portal was a rough, hand-hewn bench and after a few seconds spent staring blankly at it, Melanie realized she was eyeing it as a place to spend the night. Nothing on earth was going to drive her back down that road, and no matter how cold it might get during the night, at least the portal offered some protection from the rain. And she could confront Teo Sandoval by the light of day.
A creak beside her made her turn. One of the massive doors slowly, ominously, swung outward. As dark as it was outside, she would have expected light from inside to spill across the floor of the portal, but instead, in some strange optical illusion, it appeared to her that the dark from the inside snaked out, spreading across the wooden planks, seemingly defying the laws of physics and filling the already shadowed portal.
It appeared no one stood behind that open door, and Melanie found herself holding her breath. No more, she thought. She could take no more.
“What do you want?” a gruff voice asked, the tone menacing.
Melanie couldn’t seem to speak. Now that the moment was at hand she felt that nothing on earth could persuade her to enter this strange and forbidding dwelling, if indeed, dwelling it was.
Chris stirred in her arms, one baby hand sliding upward to cup her lips. Automatically she pressed a kiss into that tiny palm. The simple gesture, the sheer banality, the sweet honesty of a mother’s kiss for her beloved child, steadied her as nothing else could have done.
She’d come so far, so desperately, and now she was actually in the company of the one man who could possibly make the universe spin correctly again. She couldn’t leave. Not now.
The shadows in the doorway, strengthened by flickering lightning and elongated by the unseen mountains looming above the house, shifted and realigned, and Melanie realized that Teo Sandoval had stepped into the open doorway and was standing not three feet in front of her, watching her closely.
His dark hair, long and as black as the night, blended with the shadows, as did his swarthy face and dark clothing. But she could easily see his odd, pale blue-gray eyes and knew he was studying her intensely even as he didn’t reveal a single clue to his own thoughts.
She needed him so much, had sought him out for so long, that she felt tears prick her eyes. Don’t make me do this, she wanted to tell him. Don’t make me beg.
“You have to help me,” she said abruptly, and only realized—after she’d closed her mouth—that she hadn’t voiced it as a plea, but as a rough command.
She clung to his gaze as if his remarkable eyes were the only thing between her and drowning. Again she felt that brush of his inner self, if not his thoughts. Alone, he seemed to project at her, not as a state of mind, but rather as a state of permanent being. Searching quickly, lightly, she intuited no hint of self-pity or despair, only fact, unequivocal and unconditional.
She swiftly closed the tenuous bridge between them, sealing him off, not willing to let this powerful telepathic and telekinetic man know the full extent of her desperation, the need that had been housed in her so long it felt perfectly at home in her. The depth of that need had nothing to do with Chris, nothing to do with the PRI, but she knew if she opened to him, he would read it all.
She’d read the files on him. She knew he could pluck any thought, any emotion, from an unblocked mind. Without leaded hood, no human being was closed to him. Except her. Her own skills made it possible to close herself off to him.
But it was tempting to let him see what the PRI would do to her son. Surely that would turn the tide in her favor. Surely he would be unable to refuse helping her if he knew.
After a timeless moment or two his expression shifted, as did his body. For a split second his image hung in the air—a dream, an unsmiling Cheshire cat, face wary, eyes shuttered—then he melted back into the shadows.
“Don’t!” she called swiftly.
“Don’t what, señora?” he asked. His tone mocked her.
“Don’t send us away,” she said.
“I told you not to come, that I help no one,” he said.
“I had to,” she said fiercely. “There isn’t anyone else I can turn to.”
“You came to the wrong man, señora,” he stated flatly, and at that moment Melanie believed him. But belief didn’t dampen her need for his help, her determination to enlist it.
“The PRI is trying to take my son away from me. They mean to use him like they did you. You can’t let them do this. You can’t be that cruel.”
“I can be anything I wish, señora.” His voice was as cold as the night and twice as dark. “And as ‘cruel’ as I choose to be. Now get out. And don’t ever come back.”
Then he swung the heavy door shut.
Melanie stared at that blank, imposing door for a few seconds, feeling the blood drain from her face, the determination ebb from her heart. What kind of a man was he? How could he refuse to help a baby, a child like he must have been? How could he turn her away so callously? She dropped her guard one notch, but swiftly shut it again as she felt him questing at her mind, attempting to storm it with his anger, his own determination to break through her mental barriers.
A deep rage began to seethe in her, infusing her veins with righteousness, her mind with a nearly blinding fury. How dared he.
She lifted her fist to the door and furiously pounded, no polite series of timid thuds this time, but a frenzied demand for his return. The doors remained shut. Melanie kicked at them, yelling as she did so.
“I’ll stay here—” kick “—and I’ll sleep on your damned bench—” kick “—until we die of starvation—” kick “—but I am not going back down that mudslide you have for a road—!” kick, kick “—I am not taking my son back out into the night, into the rain! Open this door!”
She lashed her foot out at the door for a final savage kick and met no resistance.
Pale eyes glittered at her either in extreme anger or some other equally intense emotion. Melanie tried stilling her ragged breathing, her too rapid heartbeat. She felt her own anger draining from her as swiftly as it had risen. For the first time since stepping onto his wooden portal, she felt pierced by the cold, exhausted by her journey up the mountain.
“Please,” she whispered.
“How did you get here?” he asked her harshly.
She stared at him blankly. “What difference does that make?” she asked aloud, but inside she was wondering what he might do to the gas-station attendant who had directed them up this strange mountain.
A bolt of lightning razored across the clearing, bathing the portal in blue light tinged with purple. The entire world seemed infused with ozone. Melanie flinched, but didn’t make a sound, didn’t take her eyes from the silver-blue gaze before her. Please, she begged silently, but still didn’t lower her guard.
“For the night only,” he rasped. She couldn’t fool herself enough to imagine there was anything remotely inviting in his tone or in his eyes. He melted into the shadows once again, this time leaving the door open. It seemed a yawning black maw, open and waiting for her to enter at her own peril.
A chill of apprehension rippled down her spine and for some unknown reason her limbs felt oddly languorous. Her knees shook and her heart thundered every bit as loudly as the rumble in the sky had earlier, and yet Melanie managed to force herself to cross that ebony threshold. Somehow the very crossing had taken on a significance of its own—brides were carried across thresholds; in some countries it was considered bad luck to talk across that strip separating the inside from the outside.
And now, on what seemed to her the very edge of the earth, she had crossed of her own accord, entered the dark domain of a man of rare power, of raw force. She had the prickling sensation of destiny taking over, of having willingly entered the twisted home of something—someone—who lived outside the laws of man, outside the governance of society.
Dear God, what was she doing here? Why had she insisted that he take her in? This was madness, insanity. This had to be worse than the PRI. But nothing could be worse than that. Could it?
The door shut behind her with a loud thud, and she knew an atavistic fear of being trapped within these thick rock walls, locked in with a stranger whose very touch granted life or could strip it away. She grasped Chris’s rounded little shoulder and held him tightly against her, as if by protecting him she could ward off danger altogether.
The windowless hallway was too night-darkened to grant her vision and she felt suddenly light-headed. When he spoke, she was unable to control her start.
“You should have listened to me,” he said. Disembodied, his voice no longer seemed harsh from disuse but rather as though it came from someplace deep inside him or from the very walls of his home. It was low and carried a note of warning, of promises long broken, of bitter disbelief and harsh resignation to the fates that guided him. In the dark, he seemed much less a man than a vehicle for the odd power he carried inside him.
She couldn’t see him at all, but felt his eyes upon her though she knew it was impossible. Even Teo Sandoval couldn’t see in the dark. Or could he? She could feel him, inches from her, so close she could smell his heady mountain scent, warm herself from the heat radiating off his body.
Was he waiting for her to say something? How could she speak when she couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t gauge his reaction?
“You leave at first light,” he said.
“My car is stuck in the mud,” she replied quickly, as if this were argument enough for her to stay.
“Pablo will help you get it out. I’m sure he’s the fool who sent you up here. I’ll deal with him later.”
“Oh, no,” she said, but his silence made a mockery of her protesting lie. “I—Don’t be angry with him.”
“If I am, señora, it has nothing to do with you.”
Melanie didn’t know what to say to this. If he was angry at the gas station attendant, Pablo, then she’d placed the man in grave danger. For Teo Sandoval was capable of doing anything. The time he’d been angry at the PRI, an entire scientific wing of a building had been smashed to bits.
“Please,” she said again, although this time she wasn’t quite certain what she was asking of him.
“At first light, señora,” he said, somehow giving the formal title a derisive intonation that she’d never heard given it before. Suddenly it was a threat and a promise at the same time. Not only that, but the tenor of his voice had changed as he spoke. His rasped voice seemed a caress now, and there was something else, some primal question laced in it that seemed torn from him against his will.
Though her heart still hammered in her breast, the pounding now had nothing to do with fear of the night, fear of the rock cave that seemed to spill down a cliff side. Now all her fear was of the man beside her in the dark and it stole her breath and made her legs feel weak and insubstantial.
She felt the dark around her as if it were a living presence. It pressed at her back, at her face, just as his scent did, as his body warmth did. Yet another shiver that had nothing to do with cold ran across her arms, and her fingertips tingled. She fought the urge to send her free hand questing for him in the dark. She wasn’t afraid of what she might find, but of what she might discover about herself.
“I…could we turn on a light?” she asked. She half wondered if he even had anything remotely resembling electricity.
“Afraid of the dark?” he asked, still not moving. His voice carried no trace of an accent and yet seemed foreign nonetheless.
“Yes,” she said, but it was a lie. Before entering his home, she had never been fearful of the dark. And she wasn’t now; she was scared of the tension in her chest, the trembling of her fingers, the ache his voice inspired in her. Most of all, she was terrified of Teo Sandoval.
A sudden clatter of objects striking the stone floor beneath her made her start and step back only to stop abruptly when she stepped on something. It rolled away from her feet, making her shiver in primal fear, only to realize almost instantaneously what the object was—Chris’s red ball.
Somehow, incredibly, in the midst of her tension, her fear, and in this dark hallway of an even darker man, Chris had fallen asleep. Only when trying to please his mother or when asleep, did he break the focused attention on his dancing toys.
“Give him to me,” Teo’s voice commanded.
Melanie shrank back from him, holding Chris fiercely with both arms. She felt Teo’s large hands brush hers as he tried removing Chris from her grip.
“No,” she said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said roughly, pushing her hands from their fervent hold.
With as great a reluctance as she had ever known, Melanie relinquished her hold on her son. It was utterly terrifying to stand there in the dark and hand her son to Teo Sandoval, a man who could render a scientist’s mind into a vegetable. But there was no alternative. Besides, if she was to gain his help, she would have to gain his trust.
She heard the faintest of rustles, felt a hint of movement in the air and then heard him speak again, this time from a considerable distance. “Stay there.”
“Wait—”
“I’ll be back,” he said. “For you.”
Melanie called out to him, but received no answer. She stepped forward, nearly tripping over Chris’s fallen toys. Moving cautiously, she stretched her hands out in front of her, but couldn’t see them, could see nothing. She couldn’t feel any walls.
“Where are you taking him?” she called out, but again received no answer. He had gone, taking Chris with him. This was pure torture, she thought. She was not only in a strange place in the dark, but an even stranger man had removed her son from her custody.
She stopped trying to follow when she ran into something, a table or possibly a tall chair. She wished she could feel a resurgence of that anger that had infused her veins earlier, but she didn’t. All she felt was small, alone and very, very frightened.
She clung to the awareness that he said he’d be back for her, and then realized for the first time how he’d said it, not simply that he’d return for her, but that he’d return…for her. She had only been thinking of Chris then, but now, by herself in the blackness, she heard the curious emphasis that had been in his final words.
It seemed hours before she heard any indication of his returning, time that stretched into insanity, filling her mind with horrible visions of what he might be doing to Chris, how Chris might have wakened and been frightened to be with a stranger, away from his mother.
Straining her ears, she heard a dull thud somewhere far away, followed quickly by his light footfalls. For a large man, he moved remarkably quietly. And suddenly she knew he was in the hallway—or whatever she was in—with her. She couldn’t see so much as a glimmer of him, but she felt him nonetheless.
That blessed anger she’d missed earlier returned slightly, attempting to override the terror she felt at being alone in the dark with him. She was furious with him for making her feel this way.
“Where did you take Chris?” she demanded to know.
He didn’t answer her, making her wonder if she’d misunderstood her own conviction that he was even there with her.
But almost immediately his hand encircled her forearm, making her jump in galvanized reaction. She jerked herself free. “Tell me where Chris is,” she commanded.
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