“Say it,” he commanded.
Say what? That she was every kind of a fool? That he terrified her? That she wanted him, for God’s sake? That she needed him almost as much?
“A verbal bargain is legal and binding in New Mexico,” he said menacingly. “Say it.”
“Six months…day and night,” she said tremulously.
“Or until I tire of you,” he said softly, his upper lip curling slightly.
She tried pulling away at this, fury fueling her numb limbs as fear could never have done. How dare he!
His fingers pressed against the back of her skull and his face lowered slowly. She resisted his approach, but his hands held her still, not granting her freedom. She clamped her lips closed as his covered hers, held herself as rigid as possible, letting him clearly understand how little she appreciated his final words.
His lips were soft against her tight resistance. His tongue teased her sealed mouth, his fingers massaged her head, her nape. When his hands lowered, when he released her, she couldn’t have said, she only knew that one moment his hands held her prisoner, the next they held her upright. One moment she’d been shutting him out, closed to him, and the next her lips were parting, her eyes closing as she drank him in.
Feeling her resistance melting away, his kiss intensified, deepened, and his hands slowly, almost lazily, memorized her curves. Unconsciously, or perhaps in a languor long ignored, Melanie found herself leaning into his embrace, clinging to his broad shoulders, pressing her fingers into his muscled flesh.
So slowly that it scarcely seemed a movement, he pulled away. She opened her eyes to find him studying her with a mocking smile playing on his lips.
“A part of my attention is elsewhere,” he said, and the bitter curl of his lips accentuated. “I want all of me focused on you. And yours on me.”
Melanie felt as if he’d dashed springwater on her face.
He released her so abruptly, she sagged a little. A flicker of something danced in his eyes. Triumph? Genuine amusement? She didn’t know, and wasn’t about to guess.
“Tonight,” he promised, though to Melanie the tone made the single word a threat.
He moved away from her, out the kitchen door.
It closed softly behind him. Mocking her.
CHAPTER SIX
Teo was grateful that the boy occupied so much of his attention as they walked along the hillside flanking his home. Otherwise he would have been forced to remember the hurt—and fear—in Melanie’s eyes when he’d pulled away from her and uttered his intentionally cruel remark. He would have been forced to analyze why he was so angry with her for agreeing to his bargain, even while a part of him felt like shouting the news to the skies.
He would have dwelt on the sweetness of her lips, the richness of her curves.
He would have worried at some method of undoing what he’d done to her already. In this undoing, he would simply have used the knob on the door instead of deliberately flinging his kinetic talent in her face. He would have assured her that he didn’t mean to follow up on his promised threat.
But if he’d done that, he would have been lying. For nothing shy of death was going to stop him from joining her that night. The world owed him. She owed him. He owed himself.
He had to stop thinking of her. He had to stop, period.
Stop here, he commanded Chris gently.
The boy stopped and looked up at Teo. He was bent nearly backward with the effort and Teo couldn’t help but smile at the upside-down, upturned face. The boy smiled back. Too easily, Teo thought. No one should trust him that much, not even this untrained, untested child.
Whatever good lay hidden inside him had been locked up years ago and had been secured with the strongest chains in the universe—the chains of distrust. And no one, not even this innocent child or his desperate mother, could pry open those forged links. He didn’t even want them to try.
But without trying, the steady honey brown gaze, the baby lips curved into an upside-down smile, the rosy flush of trust snapped a single link on that ponderous chain. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t tell the boy to stop getting under his skin, partially because he didn’t understand how the boy could do it so seemingly effortlessly.
But it hurt to lose even one guard, one notch of that protection against the ills of the outside world.
Six months, he thought fiercely. I have you for six months, he told the boy unconsciously. And was pierced through when Chris’s eyes lit with pleasure. His thoughts had touched the boy, reached inside and had been received.
What was he doing? How could he have agreed to help the boy when he himself was ostracized by the world, even the small community that hid him so effectively and used him like a bane against the physical woes in their lives? How could Melanie have wanted him to train her son when she saw the teacher for what he was, a frightening, hard man? Did she want her son to be like him? God forbid.
And yet some hitherto unused part of him stretched to accommodate the needs of the boy, the wants of the mother. If only someone had tried helping him when he’d been this young. If only someone had gently guided him through what the PRI had so roughly slammed into his mind, ruthlessly carved into his soul.
If they hadn’t been so desperate, so furious in their need for immediate results, it might have seemed fun to exercise his abilities before those that so craved seeing them. And hadn’t a part of him reveled in the stretching of his power, hadn’t he truly leapt to their challenge? The answer was a harsh yes. For a while, a part of him had warmed to the power in him, the invincibility.
It was only later, when he began resisting, when he had talked with a few of the others the PRI had held inside their comfortable prison, that he had fully understood what the PRI really wanted of him, how far they were willing to go to get it and how little they cared what happened to him in the process.
“Dance?” Chris asked aloud, almost fretfully. A mental image of his entourage appeared in Teo’s mind. How much of Teo’s thoughts had he been privy to just then? Was this his way of shutting them out?
Teo held his breath as the images strengthened in his head. As before, Chris was communicating directly from mind to mind. It wasn’t adept yet, not strong, but the boy’s meaning was clear, direct. And so very, very familiar. Not the pattern, but the ability. Once again he felt rocked to his soul. He wasn’t the only human being on earth who could speak with thoughts.
Dance? Chris imaged again, stronger now. Sharper in meaning and definition.
Teo shook his head. “No, son. We’re going to try a new game.”
He sat down on a large slab of limestone, patting the sun-warmed rock, then lifting Chris to sit beside him. The boy’s weight should have seemed insignificant, minuscule, but it didn’t. The feel of the child’s small chest, vulnerable and so very fragile, shook him to the core. The boy felt comfortable, easy in his hands, and it made him feel that way, too.
And these newfound emotions made him feel he teetered on the edge of certain doom.
To take his mind away from the unfamiliar tingle of closeness he felt reaching out for the boy, stretching simply for him, he directed Chris’s attention to a single wildflower some four feet away from them. The bright red plume of color, an Indian paintbrush by colloquial name, bobbed on the light October breeze.
“Can you make the flower dance?” Teo asked.
“No!” Chris said swiftly, distinctly.
“Why?”
Chris didn’t answer. In answer, Teo’s mind was suddenly filled with several conflicting images: the ground, a rope holding the flower, a vacuum cleaner sucking ferociously at the plant, Melanie crying, and finally, a dead plant in a white room, the feral, pleased face of a man in a white coat.
Teo wasn’t surprised at the clarity and sharpness of the boy’s imagery. Chris might be only three, but he had the focal acuity of an adult. Images had always been Teo’s life, and would forever be an integral part of his talent, as they would undoubtably be the same for Chr
is. But he didn’t understand these.
He transferred the imagery back to Chris with a mental question, What are these, what do they mean?
He received the same set of images, but with greater agitation. No matter how he tried, Teo couldn’t grasp the correlation between Melanie’s tears and Chris’s reluctance to make the flower dance. Unless Melanie fell apart when Chris displayed his gifts.
But she wasn’t shocked by the talent. Lord knew, he’d flung his own abilities at her and she scarcely gave any outward sign of even noticing it. And since her mind was closed to him, he couldn’t probe her inner thoughts. She had stiffened, but that could be explainable by the very tension that seemed to crackle between them. He would give her a few more demonstrations, see how she reacted. And then he would ask her why Chris would see her in tears in relation to a dancing plant.
The plant rooted to the ground, he understood. It was a simple statement of fact. The plant’s being grounded made the raising of it more difficult. Questions as to logistics had obviously cropped into Chris’s mind. Did he break the blossom free? Did he raise the entire plant? The decisions automatically became more involved, more complex. The vacuum-cleaner-hose symbol probably related to the difficulty of uprooting the plant.
But the image that disturbed Teo the most was the dead plant in the white room, the feral-faced man in the white coat. It bothered him because he recognized those mental pictures. Not that specific room, perhaps, but enough similarity about it to know the feel and flavor of a scientific laboratory. It was more up-to-date than the labs the PRI had hustled him through, but Chris’s imagery was strong and rich enough to convey the unease, the discomfort, the avid eyes of the men watching behind clouded mirrors. Psionic Research Institute scientists, trying their tricks on a three-year-old infant. And he knew from the overlying confusion and tinges of sorrow in Chris’s projections that those men had already made the boy kill. Just a plant, just a small flowering plant, but their inhuman lessons had already begun. Did this image explain Melanie’s tears? Her desperation?
“Okay. Let’s start with the pinecone lying over there.” He pointed to a large ponderosa seed casing and said, “Can you make it dance?”
Immediately the pinecone shot into the air, bobbed for a moment, then drifted toward Chris. The animation slid from the little boy’s features. The baby lips parted and the eyes dulled.
“Can you hear me, Chris?” Teo asked. He received no answer. He projected the question directly at Chris’s mind. He felt the wordless query deflect from the boy’s thoughts, almost as though absently batted away.
He redoubled his efforts. This was the first step, clearing the blockade Chris established when making things dance. Teo knew full well what a peaceful prospect it was to shut out the world, to focus all one’s attention on a single spinning thing. But, as was obvious from Melanie’s rigid barrier to anyone piercing her thoughts, there were other means to guard a mind against the full onslaught of humanity’s demanding thoughts. And to lose one’s self so thoroughly was to invite danger.
Fire could break out and Chris would never notice it. A truck could careen into a sidewalk and Chris never hear it thundering toward him. The PRI scientists could set him to whatever task they chose, then abandon him to the consequences as they had tried abandoning a younger Teo.
He didn’t want to jar Chris from the intense concentration. He could remember all too well his father’s sudden slap or his mother’s darting swipe at the objects his younger self sent floating around a room. He remembered the disorientation, the embarrassment, the clatter of objects crashing to the floor, lying broken in a welter of confusion.
There had been no one to help him.
But Chris didn’t have to face the same nightmares. He was there to help Chris. This notion made him feel more powerful than anything his talents had ever done for him.
He sent a minute strand of energy outward and seized the dancing pinecone. He held it perfectly still in midair. He felt Chris tugging at it, was even slightly surprised at how he had to strengthen his own effort to hold it. Then he saw a furrow cross the little brow, watched as the little lips puckered. He smiled a bit, and the curvature felt bittersweet even to himself.
Give it to me, Chris demanded suddenly. Angrily. Clear, concrete thought, unconscious command. Petulance and precociousness combined in a mind that could rock nations and slammed into his head in a mental shout. Mine!
Teo’s smile broadened, enjoying the mental battle, the breakthrough.
You have to take it, he told the boy. He felt a poignant elation; he had gotten through that tight web of concentration. His part of the bargain had begun.
The pinecone slipped a little when Teo thought of the part of the bargain he fully intended to institute that night.
As the shadows lengthened, Melanie found herself growing more and more tense. Not, oddly enough, out of worry for Chris. Earlier, she’d been in the kitchen wondering if she should fix lunch when a loaf of bread she’d set out on the tiled island bar suddenly disappeared. She had found the bread and a waxed paper-wrapped sheaf of thinly sliced, highly seasoned brisket in a gaily decorated basket outside the heavy wooden doors of Teo’s mountain retreat.
She’d had no doubts some erstwhile townsperson had placed it there. She’d looked around, but saw no one. The basket contained no note, no explanation. Was this how Teo survived the harsh seclusion? People he helped brought him gifts of food or clothing? It made perfect sense, even if it vaguely disturbed her. It smacked of the Greeks offering libations to the gods on Mount Olympus, seeking not to help them, but to placate their wrath.
Shortly after the bread had whisked from view, the brisket had followed suit, literally having been snatched from her suddenly empty hands. Teo had obviously purloined it for a picnic lunch for he and Chris.
When it had happened, Melanie had felt an odd queasiness, a primal dislike of the unknown. She’d felt the same way when she’d reentered Teo’s bedroom after they’d gone. She’d planned on finding something of his to wear, at least until she got to her car and retrieved their clothes. She’d discovered she needn’t look far. Her suitcases were already resting against the doors of the closet. She hadn’t had to wonder how they’d got there, nor how Teo had managed to retrieve them from a locked trunk.
She’d stood beside them for a full minute before reaching out to open them. Her heart had beat unaccountably faster and her fingers had felt numb as she picked through the items inside. She had known Teo was a telekinetic before ever coming there. She’d known about him.
But knowing and continually stumbling over proofs were two different things.
She had tried telling herself that Teo’s remarkable abilities were only graduated versions of Chris’s talents. But they were far more than that. Chris could make his toys dance while exerting extreme concentration. Teo could manipulate the world while doing other things.
Was that what she wanted him to teach Chris? She didn’t know. Maybe. But would it have to include the sense of isolation that Teo steeped himself in?
She’d hurriedly made herself a bowl of soup and almost wolfed it down, half expecting it to vanish, also. It hadn’t, leaving her feeling vaguely foolish.
Not for the first time, she pondered the ramifications of having such tremendous gifts. When she was a child, she had loved watching a television program about a witch married to a mere mortal. The witch could wiggle her pretty nose and do anything she wanted. The whole thrust of the story was that doing such magical things was humorous, but wrong. Every time the witch did something with her natural talent, the husband would take her to task and, properly chastised, the witch would promise to be good, be better, never use her gifts again.
Teo was a dark, mysterious version of that witch. But he lived alone. He didn’t try to do “better,” didn’t make any promises to the world. Or excuses. He simply withdrew from it. But unlike the witch in the story, there was no colony of like-minded twitchers who could erase the dreadful loneliness th
at must surround him. And if there was one, would society, in its fear and prejudice of the unknown, allow it to survive? She didn’t think so.
Was there anything Teo Sandoval couldn’t do? He could save a life, take one away. He could build a home directly into the wall of a mountain, he could destroy a two-story building with a flick of his finger. He could get her son to feed a fox and her to forget her fear of the dark side of him. At least for a moment.
Thinking about his gifts, she was struck suddenly with a stray hint of her own. She had dreamed of Chris singing a song about foxes and awoke to find him feeding one. But the dream, like so many she’d had in the past few months, had carried an ominous feeling, a notion that things were amiss, out of kilter. Danger stalked her in the dream. But in this morning’s dream danger had worn Teo Sandoval’s face, and her name had been on his lips.
What did the dreams really portend? That they were in greater danger with Teo than with the PRI? Please, she begged the darkening sky, don’t let that be the case.
Eyeing the elongating shadows, wondering how to light the kerosene lanterns, she wished her mind didn’t keep continually skidding into Teo’s bedroom, onto that soft, down-filled bed, and devoutly wished her heart didn’t accelerate at the thought.
She’d spent most of the restless day exploring her new quarters. Her home for six months. She had tried anything to make the situation seem even remotely normal, the bargain the veriest bit acceptable. But her mind kept returning to that semidarkened bedroom, to that dark tunnel that led to his home. To the kiss they’d exchanged inside its pitch-black corridors. And the kiss that morning in his sun-dappled kitchen.
She walked the length of the house, looking for matches, something to give her a clue as how to light the lanterns hanging in every room. She was struck again by the fact that except for the distinctly unusual element of having been built directly from the natural cave formations on the rock cliff, Teo’s home was arranged much as a typical house might be. The largest cavern served as a living-drawing room, with hand-carved, Taos-style furniture loosely placed around a large Navajo rug near the huge glass windows. The room itself was roughly forty-by-sixty feet in width and breadth, large enough to hold an army.
Sharing the Darkness Page 10
