Solstice Surrender

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  Rhys’ explanations made a superficial sense. They fit with her own sense of rightness. But the facts supporting his reasons were the stuff of fantasy. Fairy-tale logic. That was the point where her defenses rose. To go against the ingrained attitudes of a lifetime….

  She was saved from having to answer right away by the arrival of their food. She fell on hers, cutting into the salmon straight away. Rhys, too, tackled his plate with gusto. Well, he would need the EFAs, too.

  She sheered away from that line of thought and pondered instead the question Rhys had raised. Would Kevin have accepted what he had seen if he had been there tonight? She looked at Rhys. “Did Kevin ever see you do…anything?”

  He shook his head. “The law, the precept, prevents us—any of us—from using powers or displaying talents where a temporal will see them or be affected by them. The whole Corpus Temporalty was built around that precept. Temporals must never know, guess or even suspect our world exists.”

  She continued eating, mulling it over.

  They were drinking coffee before Rhys spoke again. He tapped his spoon against the side of the cup in a thoughtful way, then put it down. “Let me give you a demonstration.”

  “Here?”

  “Why not?”

  “Won’t the brimstone and smoke draw attention?”

  He rolled his eyes, then settled back in his chair, his long legs stretched out before him. The silence lengthened.

  “And?”

  Finally, he spoke. “In the coffee shop, you heard me when I told you to keep walking.”

  “Well, yes.” She shrugged.

  Yet I didn’t speak. The words echoed in her mind as if she had heard them, yet Rhys’ lips had not moved.

  She swallowed. “Ventriloquism?”

  He shook his head, smiling. Then he sighed. “Cognitive dissonance. You have a vested interest in not believing what you saw and heard today, so the details will already be hazy in your memory.”

  “Am I really being that stubborn?”

  “You’re not the worst case I’ve come across.” He smiled a little. “Let’s try something else. I want you to close your eyes and—have you ever meditated?”

  “Me?”

  “Well, it helps if you’ve had practice clearing your mind. Close your eyes and think of a dark place—a tunnel, going endlessly back.”

  Curious, she closed her eyes and tried to think of the nothing he had been indirectly asking her to think of. It took a moment for her to let go of her other senses. She heard the murmur from other diners, the soft chink of cutlery against the beautiful porcelain china they used here. She smelled her coffee and felt the rough burr of the tablecloth beneath her fingers.

  She was very aware of Rhys, sitting across the table watching her.

  Then she took a deep breath and consciously tried to let it all go, to relax and fall deeper into the well of blackness she pictured in her mind, shutting down her hearing, concentrating on the nothing inside.

  In her mind’s eye she saw herself. It wasn’t her own thought—she wouldn’t think of herself from that outside perspective and it had a foreign, odd quality that marked it as not her thought. She saw a woman sitting at a table, one forearm resting across the tablecloth before her, her head bowed. She seemed slender to the point of illness. Her collarbones lay starkly outlined above the scoop neck of the tee-shirt, and her arms seemed thin. But her hair glowed golden red in the lights from the restaurant, rippling down across her shoulders. He wanted to push back the long lock there, that one, back over her shoulder….

  Jenna jerked her head up to look at Rhys and for a moment even while her eyes flickered open the image remained, along with the unmistakable impulse that accompanied it. It disappeared a second later. The delay told her it was not simply something she had dreamed up on her own.

  Rhys leaned over the table and lifted the lock of hair that lay against her chest, and pushed it back over her shoulder. “That’s better.” Then he leaned back again, his black eyes with the tiny crow’s feet marks at the corners watching for her reaction.

  “How?” Her voice croaked. Her heart beat heavily. This was evidence. Proof. How could she deny it any longer and maintain any self-respect? And if she must accept this moment, then the other moment in the coffee shop must also be as Rhys had maintained. She had made that woman dump the coffee.

  Her gut clenched tight and her skin prickled with tension. “Why? Why any of it, what did Hine want with me…?”

  “The how I can’t answer. As for the why—that’s for later.” He looked around. “For daylight and an absence of night fears.” He held up a hand as if she wanted to protest. “I promise that there will be an explanation. For now, let me leave it at this: The skills we have all are a product of our fields. Some of us have large fields, others have small ones. Each of us can sense the others’ fields and sometimes from long distances away. The closer we are, the more detail about that field we can sense.”

  “But it wasn’t ‘sensing’! You put in my mind what you were seeing. What you felt.”

  “Those of us working together can do that.”

  “Working together?”

  “Or simply being together. Close association builds bridges and sometimes unexpected synergies.” He rubbed his temple. “Which makes it impossible for us to lie to each other. You can’t lie in your mind. But enough for tonight, Jenna. You’ve got more than enough to think about.”

  “Can I do that too? Give you my thoughts?” Then she blushed as she added, “Or have I been giving them to you all along?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. It’s not like radio waves that are out there to be scooped up by any competent radio receiver. It takes an act of will to share your thoughts. But if you can hear me, then I most certainly can hear you, if you learn how.”

  “How?”

  “You pass it over. A deliberate decision, a determination to send it out. But don’t try it tonight. You’re still recovering from this afternoon.”

  Enough clues had been dropped for her to grapple with the problem. She married up what she had experienced a moment ago with her emotions and actions this afternoon in the coffee shop—the moment when she now realized she had been…what? Using her powers? She sidled away from that cliché and studied Rhys instead. He watched her, his eyes narrowed a little.

  She tried a simple thing. She ‘pushed’ a thought at him. Can you hear me?

  No reaction. She shrugged. “You’re not hearing me.”

  He smiled a little. “At first, it’s a lot easier to give something that has emotional importance to you. It’s easier to push.”

  His use of the word ‘push’ to describe the process reassured her. She was on the right track, then. At the coffee shop she had been emotionally wound up. But what of emotional value could she push at him now?

  She thought of the intoxicating need for him she had experience the moment she had seen him. The disorientation….

  She studied him. Rhys calmly sipped his coffee, looking urbane and comfortable, while her gut churned with the remembered maelstrom. She deliberately recalled the moment when he had finally looked at her. It built inside her, a hot ball of emotions and images jumbled together. And just like at the coffee shop, she pushed it at Rhys, a mental shove she could feel with her body.

  She knew she had managed it when Rhys put his cup down very suddenly—exactly like he had been struck by a thought. His eyes widened. “Again.”

  “If it’s just like a thought, can’t you simply recall it for yourself?”

  “I have to have seen and felt it clearly the first time to recall it properly the second. It was too bright, too loud. Do it again.”

  “I don’t know that I can.” Her cheeks prickled with heat.

  His head bent a little sideways. “Don’t leave me confused, Jenna. I know what you were showing me. Today in the coat shop.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why that moment?”

  “Because…well…” Showing him would explain it
better and faster. She let the hot ball of feelings well up inside her again and pushed it out towards him, trying not to shove so hard. She kept the single moment clear in her mind along with the feelings that went with it. She discarded the rest of the package.

  “More.”

  She replayed the next few minutes, alternatively recalling them, then nudging them towards him. Then she discovered the trick of thinking and sending at once and let the rest of the confusion, the feelings of betrayal, the lingering emotions over Kevin’s death, play out in her mind.

  Then she opened her eyes and looked at Rhys, her gut still churning. What would his reaction be?

  He nodded slowly. “I see.” Then he swivelled to face her squarely. “Let me show you something, now. It may ease your mind.”

  A feather of fear touched her. “How well did you know Kevin?” she asked. “Is it something about him?”

  “No.” He smiled a little. “Kevin and I got along tolerably well, given our differences of opinion. But he would never have confessed anything to someone like me.”

  Jenna took a deep breath. “Or me.”

  He nodded again, as if it wasn’t a surprise. “Close your eyes. You’ll find it easier that way until you’ve had more practice.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to think of the black well she had used before. And suddenly the images appeared there, firm and detailed. She immersed herself in them, caught by their intensity, the emotions in them, drawn into the story they unfolded.

  A young Rhys, a long time ago—how long, she couldn’t figure. No reference appeared for her to establish time beyond the certainty that this memory came from long ago. Rhys, staring out across the Atlantic, towards the shores of North America, knowing he was doomed to leave his home, his country, that he was being called there. She was there: the unknown woman who held his fate in her hands.

  A flicker of impressions came, too fast for Jenna to separate them individually, but the overall impression of time passing: hard work, fear, loneliness. Danger and the constant search for her. The one that he had come to America to find. The signs had faded, the search turned cold. But he had continued the fight, knowing that his future remained set.

  And then the sense of her had flickered back into being, like a candle coming back to flame. Weak at first. Hazy and out of focus, difficult to locate. But she was near. Very near.

  And then the burst of energy, the increasing strength…which drew the attention of others beside himself. They all began to draw in upon the growing power, the untouched field…

  Banff, where the call had inexorably led him. His hunt through the streets, in search of a woman he did not know and would not recognize. And then, clear as a shout, the surge that had grabbed his heart and mind and told him without words her location. The jolt had pushed him into teleporting without pausing to consider the wisdom of jumping to a place he didn’t know, where people would see him. He jumped, pulled by the imperative quality of the surge in her field and the hovering presence of another field, one he knew, far too close by her. It had been instinctive and pure luck. He had arrived just outside the back door of the coffee shop as the uproar went up inside and hurried in, brushing past bewildered staff, just in time to see Hine get to his feet, ready to confront a tall woman walking towards him.

  It was her. He knew it with utter certainty. And she was in danger.

  He let his instinct lead him. He pushed his mental command at her to keep walking and stepped beside her, bringing her within his own field, which was potent enough to keep Hine at bay—especially while in public. But while Hine couldn’t use any esoteric methods to halt or delay them, he could still use physical force, so when they had reached the pavement outside the store, Rhys had instantly begun to run. He’d hoped to put distance between her and the reinforcements he knew Hine would call up.

  Marvellously, she’d followed him without endless badgering demands for explanations. She’d accepted everything he’d done almost as if she had known why he did it, and now he knew that she did know, was a consummate professional in her own right. Of course, it all made sense—her life, whether she had known it or not, had been destined to serve the human race and she would have naturally found such a niche on her own.

  Then, because she’d behaved so sensibly, he’d risked showing her his face in the store. She’d recognized him as he’d known she would, but for a stunning second his own astonished delight gripped him. She was…perfect. There was no other way to describe her. Had he been able to choose her; her hair, her eyes, her clear skin, they would all have been assembled to create the woman before him. While he bathed in the pool of delight, he wondered if the fates that dictated such destinies had arranged things this way. Although fate often seemed capricious and cruel, sometimes it showed unexpected empathy for the people it shoved hither and yon.

  For moments after that first stunning examination of her, he’d been busy with details of survival, strategies and plans, but when finally he could draw breath and pause, the impact of her presence crowded in on him again. She was here. He could touch her. He must touch her, or go mad. The pressure of years of wondering, of waiting, must be released.

  And now she sat before him at the table, hot-headed and damned sexy with it and with every moment that passed as she struggled to offload a lifetime of prejudices that she thought were incontrovertible fact, as she tried—oh, so hard!—to give him a fair hearing, to find a way to accept everything bore down upon her, his admiration for her grew in leaps and bounds. Such a woman! She was worthy, indeed.

  He looked at her, at the signs of recent sorrow and the markers of strength: the squared shoulders, the clear-eyed gaze, the fine line between her brows. The pressure to touch her again simmered. The need to take her, make her his, it was a hot cauldron burning within. But patience. She was strong, but she had been bruised badly—

  Jenna gasped and opened her eyes, reaching automatically for the water glass, for anything to keep her eyes from his. She gripped the stem of the water glass and took an unsteady sip. Her body tingled, every nerve ending alive, writhing with the damned back pressure of a sexual need that threatened to explode. She ached with the need to be touched, to make love. And that, finally, made her look at him.

  Despite all the fiery impatient emotions broiling within him that he had just revealed to her, Rhys sat in his chair calmly watching her.

  She took a breath, trying to still her frenetic heartbeat. “Do you know what you’re doing? What that does to me?”

  “To the mind, a remembered emotion is no different from an emotion prompted by something in the present moment. If you were to vividly recall an argument you had with your boss a year ago, it would recreate the same physical response as having an argument right now. We’ve discovered that an emotion given to us by another as I just did to you does the same thing.”

  “You know what you showed me, don’t you?”

  His gaze held hers again, not letting go. “Yes, I know what I showed you.”

  She licked her lips. “Isn’t it unfair, making me want you?”

  “As you did to me a moment ago?”

  His calm matter-of-fact handling of such a sensitive subject, such a strange subject, allowed her to deal with it as prosaically as he. She could acknowledge the truth. “I had forgotten about that.” But her cheeks still burned.

  “It can get confusing,” he agreed, his tone even. Friendly. “You may end up wondering what came first, like the chicken and the egg. That is why I had to show you that what I’m about to do next isn’t because of what you just showed me. That it isn’t your emotions goading me.”

  Her heart gave a little jump. “What you mean is that you….” She took a deep breath, trying to finish the sentence, but she simply couldn’t. These were concepts and words that only an hour ago were the stuff of fantasy movies and the types of novels she used to avoid. Now she had to deal with it, yet a part of her still felt ridiculously self-conscious and stupid using language that properly belonged to wi
zards and fairies.

  Tell me this way if you can’t speak it aloud. His voice sounded in her mind. We two will never be able to hide from each other.

  Jenna knew she would have to deal with the long term implications in his thoughts and that she had glimpsed in the memories he had shared with her. For now she took a deep breath and deliberately spoke aloud. “You wanted me before I gave you my thoughts. That is what you wanted to show me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  So I can show you this….

  The images/feelings came at her as a sensual junket, too entwined to differentiate or to separate out the perspective. Her body, naked, against his. Hot flesh against hot flesh, the overwhelming joy of sliding his cock into her, the heavy weight of her breasts in his hands, the shape of her nipples against his tongue and brushing his teeth. Her hair sliding across his chest and the intoxicating scent of it wreathing him. Softness. Warmth. Striving for the climax, straining against each other. Murmured delight….

  Without warning, the glass in Jenna’s hand snapped at the base, giving way beneath the pressure of her fingers. The bowl of the glass smashed upon the table with a sodden crack. She jumped backwards, trying to avoid the cascade of water, her heart ricocheting against her ribs with more than surprise at the mishap.

  The waiter hurried over to sop up the damage with a clean napkin, while Jenna attempted to pick up glass fragments with fingers that felt thick and clumsy. All the while she felt Rhys’ gaze upon her. He probably found her telling reaction amusing.

  The waiter waved her hands away from the cloth. “No, no, your fingers. You will cut them, mademoiselle. Come, sit at another table. A clean table. Then we can clean up this mess and bother you no more.”

  She had to look at Rhys then, to see if this was to his liking. She was shocked to realize that far from being amused, Rhys—finally—was showing a reaction to their exchanges. His eyes had narrowed and she saw his breathing had quickened.