Sharing the Darkness

by Marilyn Tracy

  She shook her head. If real families did that, then she, like Teo, had never known what family life could be like. While hers had never been as remote as Teo’s, while she had never been literally sold for her unusual gifts, her talents had always been regarded more as curse than blessing, as Teo’s had been. As Chris’s had been, except by her, and even she had her moments.

  But in Chris, in her son who held every nuance of Teo’s tremendous powers in his baby hands, Teo had found a child of his own genes, those mysterious strands of DNA that formed another telekinetic. And if Teo Sandoval was capable of love, he loved Chris.

  Therefore, if PRI henchmen threatened to hurt Chris, if they already had him, they could coerce Teo into inactivity out of fear of also hurting Chris in any attempt at retaliation.

  She set down her mug with a sharp thud, spilling some of the coffee onto the tiled bar. This couldn’t go on. No matter how far afield her thoughts traveled, they always circled back to the awareness of something awry.

  She was simply nervous, had cabin fever. She’d been too long alone in the daytime, had spent the nights in too much longing, too much passion, too much pain at not allowing her guard to slip and her mind to mingle with his.

  But if she had given in to that sharp desire, that longing, he’d have known how much their time together really meant to her, how she had never known such splendor in her life. And he’d know, and perhaps so would she, how little she understood him. If she lowered that guard, he would know, from the thunder outside to the light flickering through the skylight, she’d come to want the dark man filling her in every possible way…more than she’d ever dreamed it possible to want someone.

  But he still frightened her, not with his powers, but with his anger, his ability to withdraw from the world, his defiance of any and all rules of society. Was want enough to engender trust? Could it ever?

  If only she had dropped the barriers blocking him from her thoughts, if only she’d let him understand some of her own abilities, she thought now, she would be able to let him know how terrified she was that something was wrong.

  If she had ever let him in, then perhaps she could now call to him, have him return, bringing a safe and happy Chris with him, proving all her fears silly things, after all.

  Her arms were cold and she found herself wishing, praying, that Teo was back, that she could confide some of her fears in him. But he wasn’t the sort of man one went running to with confessions of nerves. He might have been tender the night before, but that tenderness didn’t extend to the world outside his bed. She knew this instinctively. She’d seen the truth of this in his shuttered gaze, that distant look he gave her before leaving his bedroom each night. Even if she’d seen it through eyes glazed with tears.

  What possessed her to even imagine that a man like Teo Sandoval would be capable of such emotions as gentleness, chivalry? Chris, she answered herself. Remember Chris. But she wasn’t Chris. She was Melanie, a woman who seemed to anger Teo as much as she aroused him. What made her think she could simply confide her fears and he would melt them away as easily as he melted her?

  Again her heart seemed to hold an answer: the night before he had been as gentle and considerate of her body as any woman could ever dream of. Certainly that she had ever longed for.

  Again she ached to lower that guard just long enough to stretch for Chris, find him, make certain he was safe, that he was happy. Make certain that he was safe with Teo.

  She paced the kitchen, stared out at the sunny deck. It wasn’t dark and cloudy. Or had that part of the dream been metaphor? She wouldn’t know unless she opened herself to the elements, opened her mind to find out.

  God, if she only dared. A part of her felt starved for the contact with Chris, ached to open herself to the man who knew every facet of her already.

  Was she only fighting herself? Was this a heart’s trick to get her to open herself to Teo? A simple subterfuge… your child is in danger, better unveil your thoughts to the man who intrigues you so. You need to know what’s going on…open up. Was it only a ploy to let Teo know her confusion, her fears, her longing for him, her hurt as a result of his nightly abandonment of her?

  Because if she so much as opened a crack in her closed mind, she would also slip into Teo’s. It was inevitable. And so incredibly tempting. And more dangerous than anything she had ever done before.

  He would see how much he’d hurt her every night, not with his hands, not with his loving, never that, not that part of him, and certainly not with his possession of her, but by his dismissal, his callous disregard of what had passed between them. And she would be forced to see why he would leave her afterward, why he would love her as exquisitely as an artist loves the canvas dearly painted, and then proceed to abandon it. And she would catch glimpses of the Teo that used to be, along with the Teo that was now. She wasn’t certain she was ready for any of that.

  But she longed to know and suspected that she might just be manufacturing this entire fear of the PRI this morning just so she would have an excuse to touch Teo’s mind.

  She all but flung herself from the kitchen to the wash-room. During her shower, the multiple jets massaging her long-untested muscles from all sides, she wrestled with the question of whether or not to lower her guard. Through dressing, even through cleaning the few breakfast dishes, the frightening notion of opening herself to him chased around in her head. And the equally frightening notion of not opening, only to discover that her feeling had been right and something was terribly wrong.

  She was still weighing the consequences when a sudden bolt of lightning shot down the abyss beyond the deck. It was followed by a tremendous clap of thunder. Teo’s mark…but Teo wasn’t there.

  The thunder seemed to continue long after it should. A huge, clamorous sound. The pounding seemed to echo all around her, seemingly from the rock walls themselves.

  Blam…Blam…Blam!

  She froze in confusion, in fear. This…this must have been what her dream portended. Dear God, what was happening?

  Blam…Blam…Blam!

  Perhaps because she’d been thinking so desperately about lowering her guard, or perhaps because she suddenly realized how vulnerable she was here alone, or maybe because the terrible pounding struck her numb with fear, she threw open the doors of her mind and sent her thoughts in a frantic quest for her son, for the man he’d adopted as father…the man she’d all but adopted as a dark fantasy of a husband.

  The block was only lowered for a split second, a heartbeat’s length of time, but it was long enough that she brushed the mind of the man standing outside Teo’s remarkable house, the source of all that noise. She saw the long corridor leading into Teo’s home and understood in that nanosecond that the tunnel acted as some kind of amplifier, an echo chamber. No wonder she’d heard it so clearly, so distortedly. And no wonder that Teo had heard her the first night she’d arrived, despite the cacophonous thunderstorm.

  She tried reigning in her mind, pulling it back behind her mental gates, knowing now who stood outside Teo’s home. She knew what the pounding was, but she’d held herself too long isolated and, as if galloping of its own volition, gloriously free for a brief, unfettered moment, her mind soared outward, seeking her son and the man beside him.

  She stretched across the mountainside, questing, searching, aching for contact. When she found them, she nearly sagged to her knees. They were safe. They were sitting together, Chris leaning against Teo’s broad form, smiling, saying something aloud about the squirrel above them in a tree.

  Incredibly, Melanie saw them through both sets of eyes, Teo’s to Chris and vice versa. And she felt a whisper of the emotions each held for the other. She caught her breath as she reached deeper and saw that Teo was thinking that Chris looked so much like her that it made him hurt. What could he mean? Why did it hurt her, also?

  “Mommy!” Chris cried out at the same time Teo stiffened, a shocked expression freezing his face. Mommy! Heart talk! I make loud noise!

  C
hris! she nearly cried aloud in joy. She felt his mind embrace hers eagerly, with innocent delight, with a tinge of relief. And she almost reeled with the incredible beauty of mingling her thoughts with her son’s again. It had been only two weeks since she had closed her mind, and she’d seen him each day, kissed him each night, yet the loss of this special communication had made the time seem like centuries.

  It had only been two weeks, and yet, like a child will do in such a brief time, he’d grown stronger, had solidified images in his mind, as though the addition of another mind had augmented his, taught him clearer mental pictures. Their heart talk had escalated to nearly complete communication. No more the simple pictures, the string of vague, sometimes incomprehensible images.

  She held her breath, missing the days she’d been closed to him, missing the small and infinite ways he’d been changing even as she’d been there so near to him. Had she been inadvertently punishing both of them to protect herself from Teo’s telepathic abilities? To keep Teo from knowing too much about her, had she denied both her son and herself the most simple of life’s joys?

  At the same time she wondered this, she could feel Teo, and unconsciously stretched against his thoughts like a cat against a warm hearthstone. She basked in his tenderness for Chris, his want of her…his confusion. She wanted to know more, but didn’t want to probe too deeply. She might not like the answers she found. People seldom did when they were eavesdropping, and there was no greater form of eavesdropping than telepathy.

  Teo, she whispered mentally, wanting him to accept her, needing him to understand what had driven her to opening now. Unconsciously, so lost in his mind that she didn’t edit her mental imagery, she let him know why she’d dropped her careful guard, her fear that something was amiss, her joy in releasing her mind, her great happiness in touching Chris again. And perhaps, on some level, she was also letting him know what she felt when he left the bedroom at night, what she was worried about in relation to Chris. All this, perhaps far more, in the single mental breathing of his name.

  She suddenly felt herself grabbed and roughly held captive. Not physically, though it might as well have been.

  Melanie.

  She felt Teo’s knowledge of who had entered his mind, who had stolen into his thoughts and mingled there for a moment. Teo had felt her lowered guard, her questing mind. He’d seen her mental imagery, her projected thoughts, but hadn’t fully processed them yet. He seized her with all his might and lunged toward her mind. She could feel a measure of unbridled shock, a hint of raw triumph, and a strong surge of a dark, unnamed need propelling him, catapulting him across the countryside and deep into her mind.

  Melanie.

  Rocking from his mental blast, his determined probing, the richness of his thought-induced voice, and terrified of the depths to which he would quest—and aware for the first time how deeply, shockingly intimate such a communication could be—Melanie slammed the gate closed in her mind, shaking, dying to know more, aching to renew the contact, regretting the brief contact they had shared for it only added to the barriers separating them, and, like everything else about Teo, served to underscore their basic, innate similarities.

  Trembling, not from fear of whoever stood outside—her brief foray into the world again had allowed her a glimpse of the mind outside, and the identity of the man it belonged to—but shaken to the core by that nearly instantaneous brush with the inner Teo, she stumbled from the kitchen and up the long corridor to the front doors. She scarcely noticed that the tunnel had been pitch black; it was almost a relief after the flares of light emanating from Teo’s thoughts.

  She gulped for air, then threw open the large doors.

  “Can I help you?” she asked breathlessly.

  “No, señora,” the man on the portal said. “I am hoping I can help you. And Teo.”

  Carrying Chris securely in his arms, Teo raced down the final embankment leading to the hill above his home. How long had he been running? Had he even really touched feet to the ground? He didn’t know, couldn’t even answer himself. All he knew was that he had to get to his house. Not for the first time, he wished that telekinetic ability conferred the talent to teleport. But it didn’t. At least, not in his case.

  As he ran, he desperately tried not to think of Melanie’s touch in his mind. It had been shock enough two weeks ago to feel Chris deliberately sending his baby thoughts into his mind. But when Melanie had asked for his help with Chris, he had expected the boy to possess many of his own gifts.

  He remembered the first time he saw her, remembered feeling the block slam into place in her mind. He even remembered thinking that her son was like her. But he’d never expected anything like he’d just encountered. Why hadn’t he guessed that she could communicate with him directly, that she could send her thoughts as well as block him from penetrating hers? Was her block as easy as she’d made it seem?

  He’d been angered by her block, but only because he hadn’t been able to probe her thoughts, her needs. He’d never guessed she could do the same with him. Why had she kept him shut out?

  He’d never guessed she could do more than block him, hadn’t suspected that she had that same ability to reach inside a person’s mind and literally touch the very thoughts spinning around. He’d been able to read others’ minds for years and years. And never, outside of flickers of it from his family when he’d been younger, not until this unusual pair had he ever had someone do the same to him. He understood now, for the first time, how enticing the sensation could be. And how unsettling.

  Her mental touch seemed to linger, as her scent had persisted on his skin, the memory of her remarkable loving yet remained in his thoughts. In both loving and in mental voice, she possessed a soft touch, lush with understanding, honeyed with depth. And somewhat skittish, wary.

  Their nights together had told him that she had accepted him on levels no human being had ever done before. But now, today, her fear and her certainty that danger awaited them clearly etched in his mind, he understood that she accepted him fully, was completely aware, and if not totally comfortable with all facets of his talents, that she at least understood them. Needed them.

  And he understood that when she sought him, no matter how inadvertent the brush had felt, she had touched him more intimately than he ever could have dreamed of, could have conjured by any use of his remarkable talents. She was like him. Perhaps not in all ways, but in the most essential of all components. His heart raced at the thought, at the possibilities.

  And, still running, thinking about the ramifications, his heart thundered at the sudden understanding of one of the many images that had lingered in her brief touch. Someone was at the doors of his home. And Melanie would be opening the doors. She might be in grave danger.

  She’d closed to him just as quickly as she had opened, so he couldn’t know just what the danger might be, what the fear in her had portended. All he knew was that nothing this side of heaven would prevent him from reaching her side, from helping her. She was his. And a man protected his own. It was that simple, no matter how complicated it might feel in his mind, in his heart.

  But even as he ran, he tried probing at her, seeking more information, seeking that incredibly soft voice, those nuances in her imagery. How could she block him? Even he didn’t know how to totally close his mind to the outside world.

  He faltered, slowed to an unsteady jog when he wondered what all she might have understood about him when she did touch him. He had probed at her, and she had slammed her mind closed. He had not been shut to her. She could know everything about him. Everything. She’d deflected his mental probe easily, but he had no such ability. If she unveiled her mind again, she could reach in and pluck anything she might wish to know.

  He stumbled, did a wild dance, used a bit of extra energy to rearrange the ground beneath him, and Chris giggled as he clung to his shoulder, blond hair flying out in baby-soft curls. For a moment Teo wished he could simply turn back time and be as carefree as this child he carri
ed. As accepting of the vagaries of a strange and terrifying set of gifts.

  They rounded the final hill leading to the clearing, and though they were too far away to see who stood upon his portal, talking urgently with Melanie, Teo was able to breach the distance with his mind. And as abruptly as Melanie’s mind had brushed his and retreated, he reached for the mind of the man who stood outside his home, hat in his trembling hands. He could only read strange discomfort, half-formed apologies, betrayal. And danger.

  And because of these incomplete thoughts, this half-blocked mind, Teo knew who it was who stood there, who had dared come to his home, knowing he wasn’t welcome.

  And, with black anger and hatred, Teo wanted to send a bolt of lightning from the sky, pull it up from the ground, and strike Pablo where he stood. He wished with all his might that he could do what he’d longed to do years ago…kill him dead.

  He didn’t know what stopped him, what held him back. He hadn’t understood that fifteen years ago, didn’t understand it now. How could he want something so badly, have it in his power to do precisely that, and then not do it?

  CHAPTER TEN

  During the short time she’d sent her mind questing, before she’d flung the doors of Teo’s home outward, Melanie had already touched the man outside and knew him to be a mild telepath himself.

  The brush with his mind also told her that something had hurt him long ago, had twisted the gifts. In that brief glimmer of time, she had sensed fear, betrayal, hurt, and yet, abject apology.

  He cleared his throat, then said, “You remember me, señora? I am called Pablo Sandoval.” He didn’t meet her eyes, looked down at his shifting feet, the rotating grease-stained hat in his hands. His very diffidence, his nervousness, let her know instinctively that he’d come to the mountain only by the most dire necessity. Nothing else would have made him brave Teo’s wrath.