by Rachel Lee
“I’d never hurt you,” he said roughly, looking away. “But I can see you’re not going to believe that.”
“Ian…” She felt the need to say something, but what? From moment to moment, she was constantly unsure what she felt about this man, what she thought of him. Sometimes she longed to reach out and wrap her arms around him in hopes of easing the loneliness she sensed in him. Other times she was unsure she should trust him at all. What did she really know about him, after all?
“I was shot,” he said abruptly.
“Shot?” All her other concerns scattered. “How? When? My God, how bad was it?”
“It was just a graze.”
She had helped patch together a lot of gunshot wounds in her career; it was an inevitable experience in a city emergency room. She didn’t lose her cool over such things.
Except that this time, the man who had been shot was someone she knew. Someone she…cared about. Her stomach twisted, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth, seeking self-control. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, knowing too well what could have happened if that bullet had hit him dead-center. “Oh, my God.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” he said, his deep, dark voice pitched soothingly. “Honey, it was just a graze. Not much worse than a cut. I put a pressure bandage on it and drove to the base hospital.”
This time she didn’t jump all over him for calling her honey. Instead she thought of him bandaging his own wound and then driving to the hospital. About what you would expect from a Ranger, she thought with amazing bitterness. An ordinary person would consider it a major achievement to have phoned for help. Not a Ranger. They weren’t ordinary mortals. They were superhuman, or they were nothing.
If he’d had to, he probably would have sewed the wound himself. Look at him sitting there, treating it as if it were all in a day’s work…which it was, for him, she reminded himself. So he wouldn’t want any fussing or concern. He wouldn’t want her to reach out….
But somehow she did anyway. Somehow she was bending over him, with her arms wrapped tightly around his broad shoulders and her face pressed to the warm, fragrant curve between his neck and his shoulder.
For an instant, he seemed frozen; then his arm lifted to curl around her waist to make her welcome. He tugged gently and pulled her down so that she was perched on his thigh.
“It’s okay,” he murmured.
“You could have been killed.” She barely whispered the words, hardly daring to voice the possibility. Everything inside her felt as if it were twisted out of shape, as if she were trying to find some kind of equilibrium in a world gone mad.
“But I wasn’t.” She was wearing her hair down, and of its own accord his hand burrowed into the silky strands. He didn’t want to think about how long it had been since he had risked letting a woman come this close. Right now he felt a very normal, very human, need to give in to some very normal human urges. He couldn’t, of course, and he wouldn’t. But, damn it, he could be forgiven for stealing just a few minutes of warmth.
After a few moments she gave a tremulous sigh and straightened. Looking at that slash of white in his dark hair that must have resulted from an injury, thinking about the scars on his back that spoke of great suffering, she ached for this man. Subjected to an exorcism as a child of six, slapped and shouted at for days. Shunned by his own church. He lived inside a concrete emotional bunker, she thought now. Letting no one come close. How sad. How lonely.
And wasn’t she doing the same thing?
Lifting an unsteady hand, she pressed her palm to his cheek, felt the warmth of his skin, the prickle of his stubble. Masculine textures that made her ache deep inside for things lost, for a naïveté that had been stolen from her by deceit. Jerry had crippled her, but this man had come dangerously close to making her forget that.
Something cold seemed to touch the base of her skull, and she shivered. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said, then rose from his knee. “Why don’t I make supper while you tell me what happened, and why you think the ghost had something to do with you being shot? I mean, ghosts don’t carry guns. Do they?”
“No, ghosts don’t carry guns.” He was perfectly capable of cooking their meal, but he sensed that she needed the activity, so he simply told her where everything was.
A short while later, as she shaped a hamburger patty, she faced him. “What happened last night, Ian?”
Something in his face shut down, and that was when she began to grow distinctly uneasy. Whatever he told her now, she realized, wasn’t going to be everything. Not by a long shot. How could she trust him if he was
withholding information? But how could she be positive that he was? The chilly touch at the base of her skull returned.
“I was checking out your house last night,” Ian said finally. “I…get these feelings sometimes. I’ve mentioned them before.”
He had, so she nodded. She knew about those intuitive feelings; she’d had them all her life, and she knew it didn’t pay to ignore them. She just hoped the uneasiness she was feeling right now wasn’t intuitive.
Turning, she set the patty down on a plate and started making another one. “What happened?” she repeated. His reluctance to talk wasn’t making her feel any better. This man, after all, was the guy who could say no with all the finesse of a sledgehammer. The thought of him tiptoeing around something, anything, wasn’t reassuring.
“I kept a key to the new lock I put on your front door,” he said flatly.
Honor spun around and stared at him, aghast. “Why?”
“Because, damn it, when you lock everything out, you lock yourself in. If you needed help, how was anyone going to get in? The fire department. EMS. The cops. Think about it.”
Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded, remembering a couple in Seattle who had arrived too late in the emergency room, killed by carbon monoxide in their home. The husband had called for help, realizing something was wrong with his wife, but the windows had been covered by iron bars, and the doors had been securely bolted. By the time rescue personnel had managed to break in, it was too late. “You should have told me.”
“You’re right. I should have told you.” But his expression never changed, and she remembered him telling her that he always did whatever he considered necessary, regardless of what others thought.
“I realize you don’t give a damn what I think about anything,” she said tautly, “but I would appreciate being informed when you take any action that affects me.”
He gave a brief nod that told her nothing, his strange green eyes never wavering from her face.
“So you went into my house last night?” she asked. “Why?”
“To see if I could learn anything about what you’ve been feeling. What I’ve felt in there.”
“And did you?”
“Yes,” he said.
Honor looked down at the hamburger patty she had been making and realized she had squeezed it between her fingers. Did she really want to hear what he had learned last night? The icy touch at the base of her neck grew stronger, and she had the worst urge to flee, to just say to hell with it all, ditch the house and file for bankruptcy.
As soon as she thought it, she felt ashamed. Her dad had raised her to be tougher than that. You didn’t run from these things; you faced them. The alternative was being locked in the dark closet of fear. Her father had been right about that, even if his methods had left something to be desired.
“What happened?” she asked finally.
“Just an hour or so before dawn, it came.”
It came. The words were like ice water running down her back. “It? You felt it?” It. Oh, God, the word gave form to the thing. Made it more than a feeling. Turned it into an entity. A being. It.
“It’s…pretty hard to describe,” he said slowly. “But you felt it, so I guess I don’t have to. It…seemed almost to gather itself. Like a storm. As if it’s not there all the time and has to be triggered by something.”
Honor sank slowly into a chair, the ha
mburger forgotten in her hand. “It has to be,” she said quietly. “Otherwise I’d feel it all the time, and I don’t.”
He nodded briefly. “That’s what happened this morning, anyway. It…gathered, for lack of a better word. The house grew really cold, as if it were sucking all the heat out of the air. All the energy.”
Honor felt her scalp prickle as she thought of that cold spot at the foot of the attic stairs. “Oh, boy.”
“Anyway, then I felt something from outside.”
“Outside?” She stiffened. “You mean there’s more than one?”
“No. It was…well, whoever was out there was human. It was no phantom that took a shot at me. But I think he might have been influenced by the thing in your house.”
Honor closed her eyes. “Oh, no…” she breathed. “Didn’t I tell you I felt like something was trying to get into my head? Didn’t I tell you?” Her eyes opened in time to see Ian nod. “So you think this thing influenced somebody to shoot at you. Do you know how crazy that sounds? Why the hell do I believe it? But I do! I do!”
She jumped up and put the squashed hamburger down on the plate in front of her. “It was bad enough when I thought some spook was trying to scare me out of the house, but this is worse. This is incredible. Unbelievable. Guns!”
And if it could influence somebody to shoot at Ian, it could influence Ian.
The thought chilled her to the very bone. She would have given a great deal not to have even thought of the possibility, but now that she had, she couldn’t ignore it. And it made the threat so much worse. So very much worse.
Outside, night had descended. Through the window she saw flickers that might be lightning or might be the bombing on the reservation. A hundred yards away was her house, in the possession of some…thing. Some evil thing that had tried to hurt Ian. That might well have been trying to kill him.
“What do I do?” The words escaped her as little more than a whisper.
“I’m going to keep reading,” Ian answered. “Maybe I can find something. In the meantime, you’re safe here with me. Absolutely no one and nothing is going to get to you without going through me first. That much I can guarantee.”
She looked down at the raw hamburger meat and felt her stomach twist. But how, she wondered, would it get through him? By killing him?
Or by turning him to its purposes?
It wasn’t until much later in the evening, with another thunderstorm breaking over their heads, that Honor recalled what Orville Sidell had told her.
Looking up from the book she was reading, she studied Ian’s bowed head in the lamplight. They had moved into his living room, into worn but comfortable overstuffed chairs, and were reading the books he had gotten that day.
So far, all the books had done was give her a much more frightening idea of just what ghosts could do. Poltergeists, it seemed, had occasionally been known to set fires. She did have fire insurance, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be sleeping in a house when a ghost started a bonfire. And if it could do that, then it could do other things.
Ian looked up, the lamplight gleaming on his gray streak and glimmering oddly in his eyes. “Problem?” he asked.
“I was just having some unhappy thoughts about the fact that poltergeists have been known to start fires. And I haven’t found one useful thing about dealing with them. Everything I’ve read so far just seems to indicate that these things eventually go away by themselves. The question is whether I can wait that long.”
He pointed to the book he held. “This one suggests trying to tell the ghost it’s dead.”
Honor thought about what she had felt, about what Ian had earlier told her had happened to him. “Great. And hopefully it won’t tell somebody to shoot us while we’re arguing with it.”
A smile cracked the frozen landscape of his face. “There is that problem. But a human agent can be locked out.”
Instinctively she turned toward the window when a particularly loud crack of thunder startled her. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “And you think it’s really going to listen?” Suddenly she wished she had to work tonight. She was off for the next three days, and while ordinarily she thoroughly enjoyed her breaks, this one loomed in front of her seemingly endless. Between ghosts and Ian McLaren, she would rather work the ER during a natural disaster.
“No.”
Again that single uncompromising syllable. Honor looked at him. “It won’t listen?”
“It didn’t feel like a confused soul to me. It felt…” He hesitated, clearly reluctant to go on.
“Evil,” Honor said. “I know. I felt it.” She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling chilled. The wind rattled the rain against the windowpane. “I didn’t always believe in evil,” she remarked. “It’s easy not to believe until you run into it, impossible not to believe once you’ve seen it.”
She glanced at him and found him nodding in agreement. His eyes looked even eerier than usual in the lamplight. “Why were you shunned?” The words were out of her mouth before she was even aware that she was going to speak them. Shock at her own temerity trickled through her. She expected some kind of reaction from him—shock, surprise, anger. Anything. But like the Sphinx, he betrayed nothing.
“What else did Orville tell you?” he asked.
“How did you know it was Orville?”
“I saw you talking with him,” he said dryly. “What else did he tell you?”
Honor hesitated only a moment before plunging ahead. They might as well clear the air, she thought. “He said his mother said I ought to avoid you. That’s all.”
“Annie Sidell.” He nodded. “I went to school with her. She was a thorn in my side all along, but that was hardly surprising, considering old Mrs. Gilhooley was her mother. The woman had it in for me.”
She studied him in silence, wondering why she had to feel so drawn to someone she wasn’t sure she could trust. Wondering why she felt compelled to question him about things that she suspected had scarred him. She couldn’t imagine anyone becoming as remote and removed as this man without a damn good reason. People were social animals, and instinct generally led them to reach out. This man must have powerful reasons for being so isolated. So unnatural.
Abomination.
Honor shrugged the cold whisper away as if it were nothing but an annoying insect. Whatever was working on her to drag such words out of her unconscious, she wasn’t going to pay any attention to it. Not right now.
“There must,” she said finally, “have been more to it than a goat as old as Methuselah.”
The silence grew long. Heavy. Rain and wind rattled at the windows, a cold sound.
“There was.”
She swung her head around to stare intently at him, having heard the tension in his brief statement. And the way he had spoken those words warned her it was not some minor, long-forgotten transgression. She waited.
With a suddenness that was jarring, he slammed closed the book he held. “I’m getting some coffee,” he said roughly. “Want some?”
“Ian…” Surely he wasn’t going to leave her dangling without an explanation?
“Look, lady.” Suddenly he leaned over her. Loomed over her. She shrank back a little in her chair, unable to look away from his oddly glowing eyes. “You’re asking questions about things that happened thirty-five years ago. Things I never talk about.” His voice was a thunderous growl. “You’re just going to have to let me do this in my own way. In my own time. It’s the least you can do when you ask somebody to bare his soul.”
“I didn’t—”
“Oh, yes, you did,” he said, almost savagely, spacing his words emphatically. “I’ve never told anyone what you’re asking me to tell you. Never.” Abruptly, he stepped back. “Now, do you want that coffee?”
Stiffly she nodded an affirmative. What, she wondered, had she unleashed? What had she asked? She had known it had to be more than a goat, but she hadn’t envisioned anything so awful that he hadn’t spoken about it in thirty-five years
.
A strong gust of wind splattered rain against the window, and she looked toward it, thinking what a miserable night it had turned into. If she were working, she could have been sure of seeing a number of auto accidents. Right now she wondered if that wouldn’t have been easier to face.
What a morbid thought! Dismayed because she ordinarily wasn’t in the least morbid, she told herself that the lonely sound of the rain and wind was getting to her. She hadn’t really been herself for a couple of days now. Not since the night she had come home to find someone—or something—waiting in her house.
“Here.” Ian had come soundlessly into the room, and he was putting her coffee on the table at her elbow before she even heard him. Fresh coffee. Its aroma was homey, welcoming, a marked contrast to the man who had brought it. He returned to his seat in the chair across from her, then put his heels up on the scarred coffee table.
Looking around her now, it suddenly occurred to her that this was probably the same furniture he had grown up with. This room probably hadn’t changed at all.
“So you want to know why Mrs. Gilhooley hated me,” he said. His voice was low, rough. Reluctant.
“Well, she might have been crazy,” Honor said, “but you have to admit, it’s rather extreme for an adult to hate a child as much as she must have hated you to accuse you of being possessed.”
Ian lifted his mug to his lips, then put it on the table beside him. “First I was possessed. Later I was a witch. Finally I was—” He broke off. His jaw worked visibly. It was the first genuine sign of distress Honor had ever seen him show. The ache she felt for him deepened, and she wished there were a way to erase bad memories for people. To just take them away and make them vanish.
“What set her off,” he said. It was not a question. “Her husband died. I remember it was August. Hot. Nobody had air-conditioning then, and we just endured the heat, the humidity, the bugs. I was just a kid, though, and it didn’t bother me too much. When all the adults were indoors, staying as cool as they could, I was usually out playing.
