by Jayne Castle
“Darwina,” she called.
“She’ll be all right,” Harry said.
Rachel hesitated until Harry gave her an assist that was more of a gentle shove. Whatever the intent behind the push, it propelled her up into the front seat with enough force to make her bounce a little.
Harry closed the door. Rachel watched through the windshield as he loped around the front of the vehicle. He was right, she thought. Darwina could take care of herself.
Harry opened the driver’s side door and got in behind the wheel.
“Where will she go on a night like this?” Rachel asked. “Last I saw of her, she was headed for the Preserve fence.”
Rachel thought about that. “I guess she concluded that her work here was done.”
“Looks like it. You were in danger. Now you’re safe.”
“But how did she know that I was in danger tonight?”
“Beats me.” Harry shrugged out of the wet storm coat, wadded it up, and tossed it over the backseat into the cargo bay. “Like I said, the psychic bond between the two of you must be damned strong.”
“Yes, but it’s not magic. Somehow she sensed that I was in trouble before I realized—” She broke off, smiling a little. “No. She sensed that there was danger nearby at exactly the same time I did. The difference is that she took my inner alarm bell seriously. I didn’t. You’d think a good psychic would know better.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I remember looking out the window several times when the lightning flashed. On one occasion I saw what I thought were the kind of afterimages that you get when a bright light goes off in front of your eyes. At least, I told myself they were afterimages, but my intuition kicked up. I should have paid more attention. I realize now that a couple of those flashing images were actually glimpses of the firebombers in the trees.”
“You think Darwina picked up on your intuitive vibe?”
“That’s the only thing that makes sense in terms of para-physics. A flash of intuition jacks up a lot of hot energy, at least for a short period of time. That energy goes out into a person’s aura. Darwina is obviously sensitive to my aura, even over some distance.”
“Huh.”
He unfastened his shirt, stripped it off, and used the garment to dry his hair and face. Rachel was intensely aware of the fact that he was now nude to his waist. The fading firelight revealed the powerful contours of his shoulders.
They sat quietly for a time, studying the smoldering remains of the cabin through the rain-washed windshield. Rachel knew they were both decompressing, but Harry needed to come down a lot further than she did. The bio-cocktail that had been kicked up by adrenaline and the use of his high-rez talent combined with the strange energy of the fire had unleashed a lot of very hot psi. She had extinguished the after-burn, but that still left a lot of heat brewing. Nature and time would take care of it.
“What was that about?” Rachel said after a while.
“I think it’s obvious.” Harry leaned his head against the back of the seat. “Someone does not want me investigating whatever is going on in the Preserve.”
“That fire—”
“Was partially paranormal in nature,” Harry concluded. “I know.”
“I would not have thought that sort of technology would be widely available.”
“It’s not. It’s cutting-edge para-technology. The more important question is who would send a couple of kids out on a night like this with that kind of exotic explosive device?”
“One thing’s for sure, those two young men are not locals,” she said. “I didn’t recognize either of them.”
“Doesn’t mean they aren’t working with someone here on the island.”
“You do not give up on a theory easily, do you?”
“Not until a better one comes along,” Harry said.
“Well, one way or another, it appears that I’m now in the market for another bicycle,” she said.
“The Foundation will buy you a new bike. Hell, it will buy you a new car.”
“A bike is fine. Good exercise.”
“You need a car for rainy days and other bad weather.”
“I can always get a lift or borrow a Vibe when I need something larger.”
“I’ll see to it that you get a car,” Harry said grimly.
“I can’t take a car from you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too much of a gift.” She waved one hand. The charms jangled in a discordant fashion. “It will upset the balance.”
“We’re talking about a business expense for the Foundation; it’s not a matter of harmonic balance.”
“I can’t believe that after we both nearly got barbequed in a paranormal fire we are sitting here in our wet clothes arguing about whether your stupid Foundation will buy me a bike or a car.”
Harry turned his head to look at her. “Stupid Foundation?”
“Sorry.” She took a steadying breath. “I got carried away. Of course your Foundation isn’t stupid. How can a Foundation be stupid? It’s the people who run it who are—Oh, never mind.”
“You’re right. We should not be arguing about the car.”
“No, we should not.”
There was a short silence.
“Thanks,” Harry said after a while. He did not take his eyes off the smoldering ruins. “For the aura fix, I mean.”
“You’re welcome.” She pushed her wet hair back behind her ears. The outside temperature was still balmy, in spite of the storm, but she was getting chilled sitting in her damp clothes. “I don’t suppose you have anything I could use to dry off?”
Harry shook off his preoccupied air and switched on the interior lights. “I can’t believe you took the time to grab your jacket.”
“I went right past the coatrack on my way to the kitchen.” She paused. “The jacket cost a lot of money. I’m still paying off the credit card.”
For a moment she thought he was going to lecture her on the proper priorities to keep in mind when fleeing from a raging inferno. But in the end he evidently thought better of it.
“I keep some emergency supplies in the back. I’ll get them.” He started to open the door to go around to the back of the vehicle.
“No need for you to get drenched again,” she said quickly. “I’m smaller than you, I can crawl back to the cargo bay.”
She scrambled into the rear seat and then into the cargo area. She smiled a little at the sight of the neatly stowed emergency kit.
“You guys in the security business are prepared for anything,” she said.
“Goes with the job. There should be a couple of blankets back there.”
“Found ’em.”
“You’re soaked. Take off those wet clothes and wrap yourself up in one of the blankets.”
She stilled. The thought of undressing in such close quarters was more than a little unsettling. But the notion of spending what remained of the night in her wet clothes was not particularly appealing, either.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’m okay. Boots are wet and so are the bottom edges of my pants but the rest of me is mostly dry.”
He leaned down and went to work removing his boots.
Rachel held one of the blankets to her throat. “Would you mind turning out the light?”
“Huh?” Harry glanced back at her, frowning. Then understanding struck. “Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry.”
He hit the switch, plunging the interior of the SUV into deep night. Outside, the fire continued to smolder, but it no longer gave off enough light to illuminate the inside of the vehicle. Satisfied that she was not going to be doing a silhouette striptease, she peeled off her wet clothes. There was a fair amount of fumbling around involved. It wasn’t easy tugging off the wet jeans while simultaneously trying to hold the blanket around herself. By the time she managed to get out of the denim she was breathing heavily and the windows were fogged up.
When she got to her underwear, she stopped,
intensely conscious of the heavy silence from the front seat. She finally concluded that since the panties amounted to nothing more than a gossamer scrap of synthetic lace she might as well keep them on. They would dry faster from the heat of her body. The bra, however, had to come off. It was sticky and uncomfortable.
She draped the jacket carefully over one rear seat and then arranged the bra, shirt, and jeans alongside it. Clutching the blanket around her, she made her way forward into the other rear seat. She settled in, knees pulled up to her chin beneath the blanket.
Harry stirred in the front seat. She could see the outline of his head and shoulders when he turned to look at her.
“Are you going to stay back there?” he asked, his voice very neutral.
“More room for both of us this way,” she said quickly.
“Right.”
The rain thundered on the roof of the big vehicle. Another bolt of lightning lit up the atmosphere.
After a time Harry spoke again.
“There are some experts who claim that people with my kind of talent are the original source of a lot of the old horror stories,” he said.
“Your talent is so rare that no one has ever been able to study it. If you can’t study something, you can’t explain it. The unexplained is frequently the source of myths and legends.”
“More HE philosophy?”
“Yes.”
“I scared the daylights out of you, didn’t I?”
“Only for a couple of seconds. Don’t take it personally. After all, you didn’t give me any advance warning.”
“Would that have made a difference?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “You got away with the scare factor once but you won’t be able to pull off that stunt again.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know your frequencies now. Try it and I’ll dampen your energy field until it feels like a wet blanket.”
Harry gave an unexpected bark of laughter. “Can you really do that?”
“Yep, provided I can get physical contact. My ability is one of the reasons the matchmakers—both the agency that handles members of the HE community and the one I registered with in Frequency City—labeled me unmatchable.”
“You, too?”
“Turns out no one wants to sleep with a wife who can suppress a man’s aura if she gets seriously ticked off. You may be the source of the monster-under-the-bed myth, but women with my kind of talent are the source of the legends of the black widow—the bride who murders husbands in a serial fashion in order to inherit their fortunes.”
“Some guys don’t like a challenge.”
For a heartbeat she didn’t think she had heard correctly. Then she started to giggle. The giggle turned into laughter. Over-the-top laughter, she realized. Very unharmonic. But she couldn’t seem to stop. There were tears in her eyes before she regained her control.
“Guess not,” she finally managed. She used the corner of the blanket to blot her eyes.
“So, why aren’t you afraid of me?” Harry asked.
“I told you, you’ve got a powerful talent but you’re not a monster.”
“When you look at me now, what do you see?”
“I see you,” she said. She frowned. “Or at least I would see you if there were more light. What kind of question is that?”
“People who have been exposed to my talent never look at me the same way again. They see the monster.”
“What do you care if the bad guys find you very scary? You’re in the security business. I would think being considered scary by criminals would be an asset.”
There was another tense silence from the front seat.
“It’s not just the bad guys who think I’m scary,” Harry said eventually. “Other people who get too close to me when I’m in the zone find me terrifying.”
The hard, flat edge in his voice told her that he was thinking of one other person in particular.
She was not at all sure she wanted to pursue the conversation down this particular road but she could not stop herself.
“Girlfriend?” she ventured.
“Wife.”
She cleared her throat. “I believe I did hear something about a divorce.”
“Figured you had. Slade would have done a background check.”
Rachel wasn’t sure where to go next. “Must have been expensive.”
“You have no idea.”
She knew that he was not referring to the financial aspects of the divorce. Harry had paid a high price in other ways as well.
She abandoned the attempt to be subtle. “Why did she marry you in the first place if she thought you were a scary guy?”
“She was an aura talent. She thought she could handle it.”
“She was probably not as strong as me.”
“No. What happened was my fault. I had allowed her to experience some of my talent while we were dating but I never went all the way into the zone before the marriage.”
“So she never knew the real you?”
“Something like that,” Harry said. “In any event, I do some regular psychic exercises to make sure that I’m always in control of my senses. At home I have a special room paneled in glass. I lock the door when I work out to make sure that no one walks in on me unexpectedly.”
“But something went wrong?”
“Laura got the code for the door,” Harry said. “I had warned her never to interrupt me during a session. I told her that I wanted to protect her from the full force of my talent when I was running hot. She respected that line before the wedding but afterward—”
“Eventually she had to know your secret.”
“I think that’s what it came down to, yes.”
“Any woman would want to know the truth,” Rachel explained gently.
“The truth was that the man she thought she loved was suddenly her worst nightmare. I was running hot—very, very hot—that day.”
“She got hit with the full blast of your talent.”
“I shut down as fast as I could, but Laura started screaming and then she was running away from me. I went after her, tried to calm her down, but she kept on screaming.”
“When it was all over, you knew the marriage was doomed.”
“A few years ago we would have been trapped. There would have been no option but to live separate lives. But we were able to take advantage of the new legislation that allows for grounds of intolerable psychical incompatibility.”
“But that meant that you had to declare yourself psychically deranged and dangerous,” she said.
“Figured it was the least I could do for Laura. And it’s not like it wasn’t the truth.”
“It isn’t the truth. You’re not deranged.”
“I hear a but,” Harry said.
“Okay, you may be dangerous. But only to the bad guys, not to everyone else.”
“You may be the exception,” he said dryly.
“You tried to protect Laura. When that didn’t work, you behaved like a true gentleman. You took the hit.”
“Like I said, it was my fault.”
There was a short silence.
“Big wedding, I’ll bet,” Rachel said after a while. “Covenant weddings are always very big affairs, especially for a wealthy family like yours.”
“It was big enough.”
“Must have been a lot of very expensive gifts to return.”
There was another short silence from the front seat. And then it was Harry who was roaring with laughter. It was a deep, hearty, healing laughter, she thought. She raised her talent a little. Her charms clashed musically as she observed Harry’s aura. The powerful energy looked strong and well balanced. She smiled and lowered her senses.
When Harry’s laughter had subsided, he looked back at her.
“It’s been a tough night,” he said. “You’ve got to be exhausted. Why don’t you get some sleep?”
“Are you kidding?” She gave a tiny sniff. “After what happened? I won’t be able to sleep a wink.”<
br />
“You might as well try. Not like there’s anything better to do.”
There was something better to do, she thought. She wanted to go on talking to him. It was so easy being with him here in the darkness. The danger they had been through together had created a bond, at least from her end. She was quite sure she could go on chatting with him until dawn.
But she was getting the distinct impression that he wanted to shut down for a while, go into his own head to do some serious thinking. She had to respect that. Besides, the sense of intimacy generated by the brush with death and reinforced by the close confines of the SUV was potentially misleading. This kind of situation could make a woman say and do things she might seriously regret come dawn. When you got right down to it, Harry Sebastian was still very much a stranger.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll try to sleep.”
She turned on her side in the seat, tucked her legs under her, and pulled the blanket more securely around herself. She couldn’t be certain, but it seemed to her that the rain wasn’t falling quite as hard now. The thunder was fainter and the lightning strikes were not as powerful. The storm was starting to dissipate. She hoped Darwina was somewhere safe and warm and dry.
The human monster was waiting deep in the shadows, his ice-blue eyes glittering with anticipation and lust. The rainstone in his ear stud glowed darkly.
“You are mine,” he whispered.
“No,” she said.
He came toward her. “My bride. My destiny.”
She whirled and ran through the sea. Sensing prey, the creatures swarmed around her. Their tentacles writhed in their desperation to get to her.
She saw the frozen waterfall of energy that sealed both ends of the crystal chamber, and somehow she knew it was her only hope. The human monster could not follow her through the solid cascade of stone.
“Why do you run from me?” the human monster said. “You were meant for me.”
“No.” She tried to scream the word but she could barely manage a whisper.
She forced herself to keep moving through the strangely illuminated sea. She had to get through the frozen waterfall.…
“Rachel, wake up. You’re dreaming.”
She recognized the voice. Harry was calling her out of the glowing sea. She struggled up through the depths, riding a wave of shivering panic. For a couple of heartbeats the real world and the dreamscape merged. She sensed the human monster closing in on her but now she could see Harry in the shadows. He was in danger.
