She started for the doorway, more than anxious to get away from him, needing to see that Chris was all right, desperate to think, to find some rational explanation for what had happened in that dark corridor, some reason why she’d felt more regret than anger when she’d pushed him away.
“After you check on the boy, you come in there,” Teo said, stopping her short. She turned and followed his pointing finger to the other doorway, the one flanking the far right of the megalithic fireplace.
“I’ll be f-fine with Chris,” she stammered.
“There’s no room. You’ll sleep in there,” he said. His tone brooked no argument.
Something in his voice made her look at him in sudden, sharp suspicion. Though she knew he couldn’t read her mind, he nodded slowly. A wicked, wholly unamused smile curved his lips.
“That’s right, señora. You wanted to stay the night. Fine. But you will spend it in my bed.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Melanie’s mouth went dust dry and her heart leapt in erratic fury. She had literally demanded that he take them in, let them at least stay the night. And somewhere between his first grip of her arm and her final shoving him away, she had clung to him, returned his kiss with an intensity of her own. Now he stood touch-close to her, watching her assimilate his words, his dark message. Was it a challenge?
As they had done in the mist outside the gas station, she felt their gazes lock, sensed a great inner turmoil in him and knew it was mirrored in herself. Thank God, she was closed to him.
His words still echoed in her ears, in her frightened mind. That’s right, señora. But you will spend it in my bed.
Dear God. He was right; she had been an idiot. To have expected anything from Teo Sandoval, to have believed that a man who lived as far apart from humanity as he did would be a perfect gentleman, was the essence of lunacy.
In those vague dreams she’d had of him, just the whisper of his name had left her shaken and trembling. And when she’d dreamed of him, she’d woken screaming…was this yet in store for her? Had she really been peering into the future as she’d done all too many times in her life? Could the future be changed, was it mutable? Or had she been dreaming her own fate?
“N-no,” she said finally. She felt the light hairs on her arms rise in sharp reaction to a sudden electrical pulsing in the room. She met his eyes fearfully, but could see nothing but her own reflection in his gaze. Somehow that frightened her even more.
His lips curved in a knowing smile. “There’s nowhere else,” he rasped.
No one had ever spoken truer words, she thought glumly, even if his meaning was far different from her thoughts. She had traveled so far, so arduously, on a mission for help that had proved to be yet another failure. There was nowhere else to go. No one to help her, to help Chris.
But climbing into this man’s bed was the ultimate line of demarkation. She would rather sleep outside in the rain. At least, she tried believing that she would. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but closed it again as he chuckled. Evilly, she thought.
The room dimmed abruptly and Melanie saw that two of the kerosene lamps now carried no cheery flame. Only one remained burning, and as she stared at it, it, too, lowered, but without going out. The sensation of static electricity loosed in the room intensified. Melanie could smell the clean, fresh scent of ozone, as if an electrical storm was going on inside the room instead of outside in the dark night.
“I m-mean it,” she said. “No way.”
Teo Sandoval chuckled again and the sound made chills work across her shoulders.
Without another word or so much as a glance in her direction, Teo turned on his heel and strode away from her. A door on the far left side of the room wrenched open with a burst of violence and whammed against the wall.
He didn’t reach for the knob, Melanie realized with a distinct shock.
Teo crossed through the doorway, the king regal in his exit. Though, again, she didn’t see his hand on the door, it slammed shut behind him. The thunderous report reverberated in the large, dimly lit chamber.
Elvis has left the building, Melanie thought, and nearly giggled. She immediately sobered, knowing she was on the verge of succumbing to a fit of raw hysteria. She could feel the tears and the laughter warring inside, fighting for release.
“I’ve been through too much for this,” she murmured aloud. Discounting her whole life of battling the unusual, as well as the last nightmarish three years, she felt that she’d been through too much in just one day. She’d been lost, was tired, had watched a miracle unfold in an icy mist and had climbed what seemed a hundred miles, struggling in the rain. She’d demanded to be taken in, only to be kissed senseless and have a man nicknamed El Rayo imply he intended to share her bed. And then she’d watched as he more than adequately displayed his remarkable telekinetic talents, dimming the lights without going near them, opening and slamming the door without having touched it.
The kiss, the implication, the display of gifts normally forbidden man, all added up to one thing: she’d made a colossal error in seeking Teo Sandoval’s assistance. The files had been right; he should be left alone. Alone.
Feeling she was treading on the very thinnest of ice, Melanie slowly crossed the huge, stone-lined chamber filled with beautifully hand-carved furniture, to reach the small open door on the opposite side of the room. At the doorway of the room, she paused, looking back over her shoulder at the door Teo had disappeared behind. A sudden crack of lightning zigzagged down the abyss beyond the sheets of glass. It lit the menacing face of the opposing mountain wall. A tremendous clap of thunder followed almost immediately, making her jump.
Was it possible that Teo Sandoval was directly responsible for the thunder and lightning? Melanie knew it was all too possible even as she wondered how she’d come to this impasse. Had he been playing some joke on her? Had he implied she would be sharing his bed only to see her blushing reaction, to hear her stammered denial?
Or was it far greater than that, was all of it some tremendous power play, some need to punish her for what had been done to him all those years ago? But couldn’t he see that it wasn’t her fault the PRI scientists had hurt him, had pushed him too far? He had to be made to understand that she needed his help to prevent them from trying the same thing with her son. Because her son was just like Teo had been; young, vulnerable, a victim.
She had to make Teo understand that Chris needed someone to rescue him as no one had rescued Teo. And she had to do this despite the fact that he literally frightened her very wits away.
At another crash of thunder and lightning, Melanie bolted through the doorway of the small antechamber where he said he’d placed Chris. But again she stopped abruptly. El Rayo had been true to his abbreviated words; Chris was nestled comfortably in a short, cradlelike bed. His coat and shoes had been removed and a soft, downy blanket had been draped over him and tucked into the edges of the hand-carved cradle.
Melanie felt the contrasts rather than thought about them. They were almost too large to truly understand. A man who shunned the world, hid from it, even lived perched high on a mountain top, in the mountain itself, was the same man who had saved a local villager at obvious pain to himself. A man who would have left them to the dark, the storm, a man who might be the source of the electrical display outside, had carefully stripped a tired little boy of his wet things and gently tucked him in a cradle.
Again Melanie remembered the words of the psychiatrist: I don’t know whether Teo Sandoval should be condemned or praised. But at all costs, he should be left alone.
She hadn’t followed that advice. And now she didn’t know what to make of it, or the man it was penned after.
Why would Teo Sandoval have a hand-hewn cradle in a room of his home, ready and waiting for a small child? Had he known they were coming?
Melanie shook her head. She’d seen nothing of clairvoyance indicated in Teo’s files. A man of miracles, certainly, but not possessing every form of psychic ability. No, he had the cradle for o
ther reasons. Reasons that had nothing to do with Melanie, Chris, or their need of him.
She crossed the room and lightly stroked her son’s silky blond head. His baby lips were parted and his long, blond lashes fanned his rounded cheeks. Such a beautiful child, she thought, and knew it wasn’t simply motherly prejudice. Chris had been remarkably beautiful even minutes after birth. The trouble was, most people failed to remember his sweetness, his innocent beauty, once they saw his toys begin to dance around him. His own father had once referred to him as the “Devil’s spawn.”
Biting her lip, Melanie knew she had to think of some way of convincing Teo Sandoval to help Chris learn how to control his magic. There had to be something Teo wanted, something she could give him that would tip the scales in her favor. She blushed furiously as her mind replayed every nuance of his kiss, of the way she’d returned it. But most of all because the memory of that kiss had triggered an answer to her own question.
Chris stirred slightly and Melanie drew her hand back before she woke him. They had eaten in some small, roadside café around five, so there was a very good chance he’d sleep through the night. She stood beside the cradle, wrapping her arms around her wet and cold clothing.
Chris’s problems were solved for the night, but hers were just beginning. The cradlelike bed was certainly too small for her to share it with her son, and there wasn’t a single other piece of furniture in the room, aside from an old-fashioned wooden highboy.
However, nothing on earth shy of a fire was going to pry her from this room, especially not to enter Teo Sandoval’s bedchamber, strip and crawl into his bed. Nothing.
She crossed to the highboy, opened one of the shutters and found a stack of blankets and pillows. For a moment she simply studied them, adding the tidy pile of comforters, quilts and down-filled pillows to the mounting puzzling details making up a disjointed picture of the man called El Rayo. She finally pulled two of the thicker blankets from the cabinet and after a moment’s hesitation, spread one upon the hand-braided rag rug occupying the floor. She removed her shoes and parka before going back for one of the pillows. Wishing she could also remove her damp blouse and wet, muddy trousers, she decided she would rather clean the blankets later than strip naked in Teo Sandoval’s mountain aerie.
Pulling the gaily patterned quilt over her shoulders, she sought some relief from the hard stone floor. She sighed, fully expecting to lay awake all night. She strained her ears to discern some indication of Teo’s whereabouts, but aside from an occasional distant rumble of thunder, she couldn’t hear anything but her son’s soft breathing. Carefully, she shifted, trying not to rub the mud from her pants onto the blankets, and trying not to think about Teo’s glittery, pale eyes, his dark face, his magical hands and the way they had felt against her cheeks, her neck, her breasts.
Teo pulled at the moist, cold air as if he were drowning and desperate for oxygen. He’d been unable to control the anger that had fumed in him at the shocked look in her eyes when he’d suggested she take his bed. He hadn’t been able to resist strengthening her misconception when he saw that she was afraid of him.
And he still trembled from his reaction to her in the tunnel. He’d come so close to simply damning all consequences and slowly bending her to the smooth rock floor to lose himself in her kisses, in her arching body.
A crack of lightning whipped across the canyon and Teo drew a harsh, steadying breath. Control. Control, he told himself fiercely, desperately. But, God, how was he supposed to regain control when she drove him insane with her beauty, wild with her touch, with her very presence in his home? She had voluntarily touched him, hadn’t seemed to feel that apparently repelling electricity that poured from his skin. That alone set her apart from every woman he knew, every human he had ever met.
He’d been out into the world a few times, had masked himself, had hidden his powers, had found a moment or two of forgetfulness. But always his touch gave him away, his control would slip and he’d see fear replace passion, terror fill in the gap. And he’d cursed those who’d felt it, who’d gazed at him so. But each time, he’d felt he was really damning himself, his fate, his misfortune.
He knew what she wanted from him, or almost. It was something to do with the PRI, and with their wanting her son. He couldn’t read her mind, her thoughts, like he could do with so many others, too many others, but he knew her need just the same, had gleaned it from her implications, from the anger he’d heard in her voice, from her determination. And from her exhaustion. He’d once felt that tired, that scared.
But that had been fifteen years ago. He was a different man now.
He took hold of the wooden railing surrounding his deck and looked down into the black chasm stretching below him. He held on as if for life itself, willing the riot of emotions in him to subside lest he bring the entire mountainside down with his confusion. He’d done it once, years ago, when his mother had died. When no one had wanted to come to her meager funeral. No one, except Pablo, and Pablo was one of the damned.
This Melanie Daniels had come with his express refusal ringing in her ears. He wanted to revile her for the desperation in her eyes, and for having a child so like he had been, who weighed nothing in his arms, who had, in sleep, pressed a chubby hand against Teo’s lips, unaware that a stranger carried him, undressed him.
A knife-like pain had shot through him at the sight of the boy in that room, peacefully sleeping in that cradle. The image mocked him nearly as much as the memory of Melanie Daniels’s kiss in the tunnel, her confusion in his living room. The child’s room, the bed, even the blankets in the wardrobe had been created, lovingly hand-crafted, at a time when he had still believed normality was possible, at a time when he’d been foolish and so very young. In the days before the PRI had taken him. In the days when he had still believed some girl from the village would eventually share his life, his bed and, with him, create children whose laughter might drive the superstitious ghost clouds from the mountain.
Or had they been placed there afterward, when he’d believed—as he did now—that the future was only something to be lived through, that the blankets and trinkets were only the groveling offerings of the fearful people in the village? Had they been placed there as a reminder?
Somehow seeing the boy sleeping in that bed that had never held a child, that Teo had finally come to understand wouldn’t ever do so, he’d been angrier than ever at Melanie for invading his home. Her presence, the presence of her son, conspired to challenge his precious hold on hard reality. Just by lying in that tiny bed, the boy made him remember wishes cast into the night long ago. And the boy’s mother made him ache with a desire to talk, to share something other than solitary meals and lonelier beds.
He’d wanted to frighten her in the tunnel, had wanted to scare her half as much as she troubled him. And had been furious with her when she allowed him to succeed. She had touched him. She hadn’t shied away in disgust, in fear. And yet words drove her eyes wide and made her hands tremble.
He slammed his open palm against the wooden railing. Another bolt of lightning whipped down the ravine. Hadn’t the world done enough to him? Must he now be forced to endure a want so intense, so painful, that he’d nearly caused a riot in his own home from his own inability to subdue the fires she sparked in him?
He’d fled to his rough kitchen, and outside to the deck, all but flinging the kinetic energy from him. He’d felt it building, had seen the mock electricity playing upon her, knew it had reached her from her widening eyes, her suddenly tense shoulders. He’d let a bit loose as he’d deliberately doused two of the lamps, frightening her. The slamming door he’d been unable to control. And finally, he’d thrown the energy to the skies, augmenting the storm she’d already provoked from him. Huge droplets of rain pelted him, as if admonishing him. Thunder crashed and lightning flickered as he sent the storm outward, drove it over the mountain range. He thought of Pablo, who had sent her here, who had once again meddled in his life, causing him pain. He let the fo
rce of the storm focus at the gas station, then, irritated with his own pettiness, let it ebb.
Couldn’t she understand that he’d retreated, had worked hard to stay clear of the world and its needs? He only helped the people in Loco Suerte when the restless anger and guilt in him grew too much to contain. And like some lord of ancient times, or some god they wanted to appease, the local people crept to his heavy doors, leaving offerings of food and clothing, never staying to talk with him, fearing the shadow of El Rayo, craving his blessing but never his company.
He didn’t need them. Thanks to the efforts of his drunken father and, in some measure, of perverse justice, he had money enough for whatever he wanted, but he found it easier to accept the villagers gifts of clothing, food, even artwork than to refuse them. By accepting them, his reputation remained intact and his privacy was ensured.
But this woman was different. She had touched him. And as such, she could wreck his peace, destroy his hard-earned solitude. Already she was making him lose his control over the energy inside him. But, dear God, how he wanted her.
She needed him, he thought, and he wanted her. Somehow that should make right what seemed vaguely wrong.
“But what the hell is wrong about it?” he asked the cold, electrically kinetic night. Didn’t he deserve her? Hadn’t he been used enough? Hadn’t he been through enough to satisfy whatever gods ruined his life?
Everyone else on the planet seemed to be able to take and take…why not him?
“It’s my turn now,” he said, and heard in his own harsh voice the unmistakable ring of a vow.
He let loose of the railing and with hard determination left the deck to enter the kitchen. Leaving that room, he crossed the huge living room to his bedroom. He found no appreciation of his home tonight. That he’d augmented huge caverns with stone walls and wooden beams, that he’d formed a dramatic house from sheer mountain, was unimportant now. It was simply a place, a place that now held two unexpected guests.
Sharing the Darkness Page 7
