by Sara Reinke
He didn’t move, didn’t as much as flinch, as she gently drew the pad of her thumb against his bottom lip; even this tender, nearly intimate gesture drew no response.
“Aaron,” she said again, her voice gravelly and choked as she cradled his blood-smeared cheek against the basin of her palm. “Don’t you remember me?"
“Easy, chère,” said a voice from behind her. She turned, startled, and saw her half-brother, Rene Morin, standing in the doorway. He was tall, with dirty blond hair worn wind-swept and pushed back from his face, his jaw dusted with light beard stubble. He was from New Orleans, and had the Big Easy accent to prove it, a combination of French and Southern drawl. He was also an amputee; his right leg, from mid-thigh down was a state-of-the-art prosthetic that allowed him to move so naturally, had Naima not known of his handicap, she never would have guessed it.
“Save some of him for the rest of us, no?” With a crooked smile, Rene walked into the lab. Obviously he thought she had either just struck Aaron, or was about to, and either way, she stood up and backed away quickly before he suspected anything otherwise.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, wiping her hand against her pant leg as if she could brush away the warmth of Aaron’s skin and the memories of him—of her past—so easily. “I…I thought you and Tessa were in Kentucky.”
“We heard about what’s been going on with Tristan and decided to cut the trip short. Wanted to see if there was anything we could do to help,” Rene replied easily. “Besides, Eleanor was worried about you.”
Movement from the doorway attracted Naima’s attention, and she turned to find a tall, slender woman standing there. Eleanor Noble was beautiful, with a fall of dark waist-length hair and large, doe-like eyes. She held her arms around herself, as if in an embrace, and studied Naima, her expression unreadable.
“Karen told us you’d been hurt,” she said at length.
Rene brushed his fingertips against Naima’s brow, where a sore knot had formed, thanks to Aaron’s headbutt. She found herself ducking reflexively, with a frown. “I’m alright.”
“You sure about that?” he asked. “You got a goose egg the size of a ping pong ball coming up there.”
Naima’s frown deepened. “I’m alright,” she said again.
“Why don’t you come with me, darling?” Eleanor offered. “We can go back to the chateau. I’ll make you some tea.”
“I have to stay here,” Naima said. “Mason said to.”
“This belong to him?” Rene had found the pistol and lifted it in hand, curling his fingers lightly, comfortably about the stock and admiring the heft. When Naima nodded, he arched his brow. “Damn. This is right nice. Wouldn’t have thought Doc Fancy Pants had this kind of good taste in firearms.” He glanced at Naima. “Why don’t you go on with Eleanor? Some ice on that bump of yours won’t do you any harm. I’ll keep here with our friend, no? I used to be a cop, after all.” Cracking the knuckles of his right fist in the basin of his left palm, he added with a wink, “I’ve handled my fair share of interrogations before.”
Naima glanced over her shoulder. Aaron’s head had dropped again, but he was awake; she had no doubt of that.
“Come on.” Eleanor slipped her arm through Naima’s, giving a gentle but imperative tug. “The hell with tea. We’ll have cognac. Michel has a nice bottle of Croizet Cuvée Léonie…1858, I think it is.”
Naima looked at her, and the other woman met her gaze. Her eyes were kind, filled with a gentle sympathy. She was the only soul Naima to whom had ever told anything of her time in the Beneath—and after that, in the hellish prison Lamar Davenant had devised for her. She hadn’t told her everything—not the whole truth, especially about Aaron—but Eleanor had clearly realized who he was, and what his presence at the compound was undoubtedly doing to Naima.
It’s breaking me…shattering me like glass.
“Go on, chère,” Rene told her gently. “I got this.” They’d had their share of differences in the past—hell, Naima had damn near telekinetically thrown him through the engine compartment of his car—but all at once, she was grateful to him, grateful for him, and the escape he was offering that she so desperately needed.
“Alright,” Naima whispered, nodding. With a smile, Eleanor drew an arm about her, a kind embrace, and Naima struggled against the unexpected and uncharacteristic urge to burst into tears. “Alright.”
***
Naima sat in the passenger seat of Eleanor’s SUV as the other woman drove to the guest cottage she and Augustus had been sharing while in California. Naima sat still and quiet, her gaze drifting dazedly between the light-bathed pine boughs and foliage ahead of them and her own reflection—haunted, shaken and nearly unrecognizable to her—in the side-view mirror to her right. From the feel of things, Eleanor had the heat blasting, every vent in the cab apparently aimed in her direction, but it didn’t help. She couldn’t stop shivering.
She remembered the soft, scraping sounds as Aaron had pried and dug at the pine planks above her dark prison beneath the library floor, sending dust and grit spattering down into the narrow cleft of earth that had served as her home for so long. Sometimes, she’d fallen asleep to the noise, comforted by it in a strange sort of way, if only because it meant she wasn’t alone, that there was somebody close by who cared about her, who wanted to help her.
When he’d torn open a section of floor wide enough to wedge his hand through, Aaron would reach down, stroking her hair in the darkness while she cried. She would clutch at him, cling to him, bury her tear-soaked face against his fingers.
It’s alright, he’d whisper to her. I’m here. I’m right here.
The Jeep stopped and Naima slid forward in her seat, startled from her memories.
“The man at the clinic,” Eleanor remarked at last. She’d turned the engine off, and the two of them sat in a prolonged, heavy silence. When she spoke, Eleanor didn’t look at Naima, but rather straight ahead, out the windshield. “He’s Aaron Davenant, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
Another long pause, and then Eleanor turned to her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” Naima hooked her hand against the latch and swung her door open wide. As she stepped out onto the gravel drive, her breath wafted out in a thin haze around her face, and goosebumps rose immediately along her arms. The ground was cold, and she hurried for the wooden stairs leading up to the cottage’s deck.
At the top of the stairs, she found Eleanor’s granddaughter, Tessa Noble, waiting. She was nearly five months pregnant, her lower abdomen a gently protruding outward swell beneath the thin cotton of her nightgown. Naima felt a pang of envy she might not have ordinarily allowed herself; seeing Aaron again had left her emotionally vulnerable. She couldn’t have children of her own. Lamar had seen to that.
“Tessa, darling, what are you doing out here?” Eleanor asked, walking up the stairs behind Naima. “I thought you were sleeping. All of this excitement and traveling—you must be exhausted.”
“I’m fine, Grandmother,” Tessa said, and when her hands dropped unconsciously to the slope of her belly, Naima again felt that wicked little pang. “I couldn’t sleep.” As Naima walked toward her, she shied back a step, her eyes round and wary. “Is Michel alright? Did…did they catch the one who…?”
“Michel’s been shot,” Naima said flatly, brushing past Tessa and stepping through the sliding glass patio door. A small, tended fire had been left to smolder in the creek stone fireplace, and the interior of the cottage was thick with heady warmth. “He’s in surgery now.”
“But yes, darling, they caught the man who shot him,” Eleanor added swiftly, sweeping an arm about her granddaughter and ushering her into the house.
“It was one of the Davenants, wasn’t it?” Tessa asked. “You told me the one who hurt Tristan and Mason, he’d been here in the woods, at the compound. They know where we are. They know how to find us now.”
“They think it was one of the Davenants, yes,” Eleanor said. �
��But they caught him. There’s nothing more to fear.”
Tessa shrugged away from Eleanor’s embrace, her brows narrowing. “There could be more of them out there,” she said. “Plenty more! And plenty more besides that on their way as we speak.” She was worried about her baby. She’d been married to Martin Davenant, one of Aaron’s nephews. Martin was dead now, but that didn’t mean Lamar wouldn’t still want his unborn heir. Naima knew this. And judging by the glossy fright she could see in Tessa’s eyes, could feel radiating off the girl in veritable waves, Tessa knew it, too. “You don’t know them. You don’t know how they are, how they think…”
“I do,” Naima said, and even though Tessa knew nothing of her past, her own encounters with the Davenant clan, there must have been something fierce enough in her face, blunt enough in her gaze, to draw the younger woman to abrupt, gulping silence.
“Naima, stop,” Eleanor said, holding out her hands as if she felt she had to physically separate them. “Both of you. Please. Let’s just sit. There’s already been enough—”
“No. Tessa’s right,” Naima said, and she damn near kicked herself mentally in the ass for not having considered it sooner. She’d been so bewildered, so shocked and upset at Aaron’s presence, she’d forgotten common sense, the instincts upon which she ordinarily relied. “There could be more of them out there.” She nodded once, indicating beyond the windows, the dark-draped forest. “I need to scout the woods and see.”
“Auguste can do that,” Eleanor said.
“Not on his own, he can’t. There’s too much ground to cover. And he doesn’t know these hills like I do. I can do it in half the time it would take him.”
Eleanor frowned, her eyes flashing hotly. She opened her mouth to argue some more, but apparently couldn’t think of anything to say. Because I’m right, and you know it, Naima thought, folding her arms across her chest in feigned patience.
“Call him and tell him to scope out the southern slope, down to Emerald Bay,” she told Eleanor. “I’ll take the north, then work my way down from there to meet him.”
It would be good, she told herself. Good to have something else to focus her attention on, target her mind toward. Something to distract me, she thought. From my memories, from the past…God help me, from the man in that medical clinic less than five miles from where I’m standing.
CHAPTER FOUR
“You’re a real nowhere man, aren’t you, salaud?” Rene snarled, clamping his hand against Aaron’s chin, forcing his head back. “No name. No identification. Hell, boy, you don’t even have much by way of a face left going for you, from the looks of things.”
Brows furrowed deeply, Rene leaned close to Aaron, crushing his jaw in his hand. “You aren’t fooling anyone. You got the Davenant stink all over you. You feel like a big man now, trying to carve up a bedridden kid? That’s how you Davenants work it, no? You like going after anyone weaker than you are—Tristan while he’s on the mend, or the women and wives you beat like dogs. Well, guess what? This ain’t your great house, mon ami. The only one weak around here is you.”
“How…how is Tessa?” Aaron rasped. “And the baby, of course.”
He looked directly into Rene’s eyes and managed a crooked smile as all the color abruptly drained from the other man’s face. Ashen, Rene recoiled as if Aaron had bitten him. Then the surprise faded, and Rene’s eyes hardened again. His brows narrowed, and he seized Aaron by the hair, wrenching his head back.
“What did you say?” he seethed, balling his free hand into a tight fist. When Aaron didn’t immediately respond, Rene shook him by the hair, forcing him to grimace. “What the fuck did you say, enculé?”
Aaron turned his head, spit out a mouthful of blood, then glared at Rene again. When he grinned, his teeth were blood-smeared, his smile ghoulish and humorless. ““J'ai dit la salope est une Davenant par l'édit de les Tomes,” he said in French. “Est enceinte d'un enfant Davenant. Nous entendons par là pour les récupérer.” Roughly translated, it meant: I said the bitch is a Davenant by the edict of the Tomes. She has a Davenant child growing in her womb. We mean to have them both back.
Rene got the message loud and clear. “You son of a bitch…” he began. He would have said more, except that Aaron drove his heel into the side of his right leg, just above the knee. They’d jacked up his telepathy for the moment; Mason had injected him with some kind of sedative, and Aaron couldn’t focus enough to summon one of his debilitating psi-bolts. But it didn’t matter.
Aaron hit Rene hard enough not only to send Rene stumbling sideways, but to knock the stump of his amputated leg loose from the silicone cradle of his prosthetic. Rene had on jeans, so his leg couldn’t completely fall out, but once out of place, he could no longer stand up, and he fell with a crash to the floor.
Whereupon Aaron rammed his heel directly into Rene’s face, feeling the moist, satisfying crunch as his nose shattered, hearing his sharp, startled cry muffled against the sole of his shoe. Leaning forward, taking the chair to which he was bound with him, Aaron fell first down onto his knees, then over onto his side. His hands were tied; he couldn’t catch himself, and banged his head and left shoulder hard against the linoleum. While Rene writhed on the floor, his hands clapped to his face, blood streaming through his fingers, Aaron whipped his legs around Rene’s neck.
When he clamped his thighs together in a fierce stranglehold, Rene’s throat was abruptly crushed. Gagging for breath, Rene slapped and pawed at Aaron’s knees, struggling to hook his fingers between them and pry them apart. He tried to kick at Aaron, but couldn’t manage. He pawed and punched, trying to strike Aaron’s crotch, but to no avail. He was strangling, growing weaker by the second, his face flushing from red to a dusky shade of plum as his furious struggles began to subside.
Aaron held him pinned between his legs until at last, Rene’s fingers scrabbled weakly against the floor, then fell still. His eyelids drooped closed, and he had a thin froth of bloody saliva smeared all over his chin and cheek. He was still alive, but only barely so, and only because Aaron needed him.
For a long moment, Aaron remained immobile, loosening his legs around Rene’s neck just enough to prevent him from suffocating. Eyes wide, breath bated, he opened his mind. Mason may have dampened his telepathy with his damn injection, but Aaron could still sweep the medical clinic. Mason and Michel Morin and the woman, Karen Pierce, down the hall in a surgical room. Tristan Morin three doors down, still in bed…Augustus Noble is with him, keeping vigil.
Damn it.
Aaron had no doubt he could take Augustus out in a telepathic duel. It would be little more than a matter of concentrating his psionic blade, probably honing it as finely and sharply as he ever had. But at the moment, he was doing well just to sense his immediate surroundings. Until the sedative wore off, there would be no way he could challenge Augustus.
Beyond the confines of the clinic, several miles away, he sensed Eleanor Noble. Tessa was with her, the baby in her womb a momentary surge of warmth and light in Aaron’s mind.
Naima is there, too.
He closed his eyes, abruptly collapsing his telepathic field. She knew my name, he thought, and God, but it had taken everything he had—every ounce of strength from his internal reserves—not to flinch when she’d said it aloud to him. She knows who I am. It has to have been from before my accident.
But while the fact that Naima had recognized him—when no one should have rightly been able to do so—remained intriguing, he knew he didn’t have time to worry about it at the moment.
First things first, he told himself. He needed his hands free. They’d wised up since using a plastic tie to bind him earlier; that had been easy enough to snap. This time, he’d been bound with rope—thick, rough-hewn, with overlapping knots. There was nothing in his immediate view that he could use to saw through them, and he couldn’t twist his hands enough to try and wrestle with the knots himself. Even if he had been able to, it would have been blindly, which would prove time-consuming.
Which was why he hadn’t killed Rene Morin.
“Alright then,” he murmured with a frown, trying to focus his telepathy again, to override whatever medicine Mason had forced into his system. “Playtime’s over. Up and at ’em.”
He concentrated on Rene, pushing himself into the other man’s mind. As he did, Rene shuddered against the floor, then opened his eyes. He blinked at Rene, but there was no awareness there. He was still unconscious, his body operating solely on auto-pilot—in this case, Aaron.
At Aaron’s mental command, Rene sat up. He adjusted the cuff of his artificial leg beneath his pants so that he could settle his stump back inside of it properly. Or at least, what felt proper to Aaron; having never lost a limb, he really had no basis for comparison, nor did he have any pressing desire to probe more deeply into Rene’s mind to learn from him if his efforts were sufficient or not.
He then stood Rene up, watching as he stumbled to his feet and teetered drunkenly above him. His arms hung limply at his sides, his mouth slightly ajar. He looked like a zombie, straight out of some George Romero flick.
It was like operating a radio controlled car. Using his telepathy, Aaron fired neurological signals from Rene’s brain through his central nervous system, down into the periphery of his limbs. Rene walked, his footsteps lurching and clumsy, until he had circled behind Aaron, and then Aaron had him squat.
Through Rene’s eyes, he studied the rope around his wrists. It looked like it had been secured using a simple series of stevedore knots, maybe a sloppy sheepshank, as well. Using Rene’s hands, Aaron set about unfettering the lines, pulling, tugging, slipping and twining until they fell away from his wrists in lank, loose coils. He sat up, pushing the heel of his hand against his brow when a wave of vertigo swept over him at the motion.
As he broke his mental hold on Rene, he heard the other man fall, collapsing face-down onto the floor with a thud, a marionette with severed strings. He glanced at a clock on the nearest wall again, and limped to his feet, gritting his teeth against a shudder of pain from his ribcage. Between getting damn near run over by an SUV, and then being pummeled by Mason, he realized he was lucky to be alive, never mind have any bones still remotely intact.
