Guild of Truth 02 - Shield from the Heart

by Mary K. Norris

  Regina’s brows drew together in confusion. “Why isn’t it working?” Her nostrils flared. Her expression went blank as she finally turned to Sydney. “You,” Regina hissed. She sniffed the air again. “What are you doing? Why can’t I smell him from here?”

  Beneath the cloth Merrick smirked. Sydney was using her powers.

  Sydney feigned ignorance and shrugged.

  Regina’s face darkened. She struck Sydney across the face.

  Merrick saw red. The back of his neck suddenly prickled. The sensation cut off as abruptly as it had come.

  Regina inhaled through her nose. “Stop it,” she yelled at Sydney before she hit her again, this time dropping her to her knees.

  Merrick roared behind the fabric. The back of his neck was pins and needles again. The cloth around his face cut into his skin. He didn’t care, he — He saw a woman with the most beautiful blue and gray eyes. His Collette. He was the luckiest man in the world. He’d do anything to keep her. Anything. He finished the last of his journal entry. He’d put it away later. Right now all he wanted to do was watch Collette as she danced. All he wanted was to follow her to their bed like he did every night she beckoned him. He’d follow her to the ends of the earth. He clutched his heart, the feelings inside of him nearly bursting with how much he cared for her.

  He hesitantly approached her. “Would you like a partner?” he asked.

  She assessed him from head to toe. He knew he was lacking. He would never be worthy of someone like Collette, yet she allowed him to remain by her side.

  “Did you finish your silly writing?”

  He stared over his shoulder at his beat-up notebook with the warped spirals. “It’s not silly,” he mumbled. She didn’t understand. Didn’t understand what it was like to see so much, to feel so much. He rubbed his aching temple. He was trying his best, but Vander asked the impossible.

  He rubbed his head harder.

  Too much. They demanded too much!

  His nails bit into his skin.

  Gentle fingers curled around his hands, pulling them from his temples. “Shh,” Collette soothed. She smiled seductively at him. “Dance with me?”

  The pressure in his head eased. “Always,” he breathed.

  Merrick gasped as he was hurled from the vision.

  “Merrick,” Sydney cried out. She glared at Regina. “What’d you do to him?”

  Regina released her hold around Sydney’s throat.

  Merrick heard the faint pounding of feet coming their way.

  Regina lifted her nose to the air. “Perfect timing,” she said softly. “Gentlemen,” she raised her voice. “The authorities are on their way. Let us depart.”

  The rag around Merrick’s face disappeared, though he knew now that it wasn’t a rag. It had once been a shirt.

  “Merrick, are you all right?” Sydney rushed to his side.

  “Hey.” An officer ran over from one of the side streets. “I heard shouts. Are you two all right?”

  The officer helped Sydney get Merrick to his feet. His head was pounding and his legs were a little shaky, but other than that he was fine.

  “We’re okay, officer,” Merrick said politely. “Just a little roughed up.” He pretended to feel around in his pockets. “Bastards got my wallet.”

  “I’ll call it in.” The officer stepped back to give them space as he pulled his radio from his belt.

  Sydney ran her hands along his arms and torso worriedly. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Her touch set his pulse racing. His cock hardened as a wave of hunger and want flooded him. Their eyes locked and he saw an answering flash of desire swirling in her green gaze.

  Fuckin’ A.

  His hand reached for her face.

  The officer returned.

  Merrick dropped his hand. Sydney glanced away, but not before he saw the disappointment. His lungs constricted.

  “I called it in to the station. They’ll keep a look out. I didn’t get much of a look at your attackers. I’d be happy to take you back to the station so you can give a full report.”

  Merrick shook his head. They needed to make their train. “That’s much appreciated but we’d rather be on our way. Could we leave the report with you?”

  The officer took notes as Merrick described Regina and her goons down to the very last detail. He even dropped her name to give her a little extra hell.

  “And how did you learn her name?” the officer asked.

  “One of the men let it slip when they were talking to her,” he supplied helpfully.

  The officer nodded and wrote it down on his pad before flipping it shut and tucking it away. “I’m really sorry this had to happen to you two. You seem like good people.” He offered Merrick a card. “You can check in with the station to see if they get your wallet back. We’d be happy to mail it to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  The officer disappeared the way he’d come.

  Merrick headed back to Market Street, Sydney at his side. She worked her jaw, reminding him that she had been hit. His temper flared. “Come on.” He led her into a drugstore and bought a frozen bag of peas from the food section with the card she handed him.

  “What’re those for?”

  He crunched the bag in his hands. “It’s for your face.”

  They made it to the Montgomery station without incident. Merrick sought out a deserted part of the platform and took a bench. He turned to Sydney and cupped the side of her face in his hand. She shivered. He pretended not to notice as he placed the frozen peas on her jaw.

  She jerked away from the cold. “Ow. Don’t you need your own bag of peas?”

  “I wasn’t hit in the face,” he said, though the backs of his legs and his knees were aching fiercely.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why’d they attack us to just run off?”

  Merrick scanned the crowd. No one was within hearing range. “I don’t think they were trying to capture us.”

  “Then what were they doing?”

  He shifted the bag against her face. “The fabric they used to cover my nose and mouth, I’m pretty sure it belonged to that Dreamer you told me about. Kevin.”

  She didn’t need any more prompting. He could all but hear the wheels in her mind turning. “That’s why they roughed you up. They wanted your emotions running high so you’d use your powers without meaning to.”

  “Roughing me up wasn’t what pushed me over the edge.”

  She blinked up at him, her head tilted slightly. “Then what’d they … oh.” Pink flushed her cheeks and she looked away. “You got upset because they were hurting me?”

  With his free hand he cupped the other side of her face so that she’d look him in the eyes. His blood rushed through his veins, his cock throbbing with repressed need. “When they touched you, I wanted to kill them,” he confessed.

  Her lips parted but nothing came out.

  He couldn’t explain why he felt this need inside of him to protect her. To claim her. All he knew was that he had to have her. That she was his. And he had to taste her.

  He dipped his head to capture her mouth with his.

  She gasped against his lips.

  He pushed harder against her, half afraid that she’d pull away.

  Fingers gently slid through his hair to grasp the back of his head. Excitement and desire spiked through him. Her lips moved under his, carefully at first before gaining more and more confidence.

  Merrick dropped the peas on their bench so he could reach around her waist and draw her closer.

  She slid willingly into his lap, her mouth hot on his. Merrick groaned low in his throat as some kind of deep tension within him eased.

  He couldn’t even begin to explain the rightness of Sydney in his arms. It was as if she was fashioned for him. Her petite body pressed tight against him, her perky little breasts brushing against his chest.

  His cock pulsed against her thigh.

  He slid his tongue deep into her mouth. She opened wide for
him, moaning as she fisted his hair.

  Merrick’s control was slipping.

  Everything about her was intoxicating: her touch, her scent, her taste. He wanted to sink himself so deep inside her body that he shook with the force of it.

  The platform rumbled.

  In the distance a child shrieked in glee.

  Sydney’s hold tightened in his hair, her tongue stealing deep into his mouth, as if she couldn’t get enough of him.

  Merrick growled in frustration as he regretfully pulled away. The platform was filling as their departure time drew closer. They were both breathing heavily.

  Sydney blinked as if waking from a dream.

  Thirty feet away a young man with a Mohawk gave Merrick a thumbs-up.

  Merrick glowered at the kid. He scampered away.

  “Our train is coming,” Merrick said gruffly.

  Sydney’s emerald green eyes went wide. She instantly released her hold on his hair. He’d been thinking of getting it cut as soon as he could but suddenly thought better of it. He liked the feel of her hands in his hair. She stared down at where she sat and scrambled off his lap.

  She brushed at her clothes as if to smooth out any stray wrinkles.

  He picked up the abandoned bag of peas and joined her by the yellow safety line. “You’re going to have to wait until you wash your clothes to get out those creases. You slept in that outfit, remember?”

  She blushed.

  He handed her the bag of peas. “How’s the jaw?”

  She took the frozen food from his hand without touching his skin. “Better.” She pressed it to her slightly swollen cheek and winced.

  Merrick shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from touching her.

  “So,” Sydney said after a few seconds of silence. “You never finished telling me about that piece of clothing that they wrapped around your face. You said it belonged to Kevin?”

  A group of giggling girls came to stand next to him. Merrick shifted closer to Sydney, uneasy. He stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets.

  Sydney watched him.

  He dropped his voice. “I know it belonged to Kevin because when I got a reading off of it there was a woman in the vision. Collette. That was Kevin’s Mirror Mate, right?”

  She nodded eagerly, all ears now. “What else did you see?”

  “I don’t just see things. I pick up impressions: thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, everything really. Kevin was writing in his journal. If Vander’s expecting some leather bound encyclopedia then he’s clearly mistaken. It’s a beat up blue notebook that you’d buy at any office supply store. The spirals are warped and the coloring on the cover is cracked and faded. I couldn’t tell what he was writing because his thoughts kept drifting to Collette. He kept obsessing on how lucky he was to have her and how she didn’t understand how hard it was for him to sort through all the information he has obtained. I’m guessing he’s talking about his Dreams?”

  Sydney shifted the peas to the other side of her face. “It has to be. If Vander was trying to find his Mirror Mate along with a whole bunch of people with powers then he’d have been demanding Kevin to be Dreaming quite a bit. That much information would be like sensory overload.”

  “That would explain why Kevin seemed to be going mad,” Merrick muttered aloud. He elaborated when she tilted her head askance. “It’s hard to explain but his thoughts were … erratic. He kept grabbing his head as if it was driving him crazy. Which I guess it was.”

  Could that ever happen to him?

  Would he reach a point in time when he used his powers so much that he’d no longer be able to keep track of reality anymore?

  The group of girls next to him started getting louder. A few even shuffled closer to where he stood.

  He shoved his hands as deep as they’d go into his pockets. He couldn’t read them if he didn’t touch them with his skin. Yet he still felt that underlying fear of accidentally absorbing something that he didn’t want to see.

  Maybe he would be driven to insanity.

  Chapter 8

  Sydney followed Merrick’s lean frame through the train cars. She watched with rapt attention as he avoided brushing up against anyone. There were a few close encounters but all he did was push his hands further into his jeans — jeans that hugged his narrow hips and surprisingly still muscled legs.

  When he’d stepped out of that fitting room Sydney’s stomach had flipped. The clothing had fit him as if tailored for his body. The black of his sweater had brought out the ice blue of his eyes and emphasized the darkness of his hair. Sydney had expected him to be lanky from his captivity but Merrick had surprisingly held on to his muscled frame. He wasn’t as big as Felix but he wasn’t too far from Joel either. She was sure that with a few visits to the gym he’d make a very impressive male specimen.

  Unbidden, her mind drifted to the kiss they’d shared. Her body grew both hot and cold. She could still feel his lips against hers, the addicting taste of his tongue and lips, her body throbbing with want, her breasts aching, her sex pulsing.

  She’d never experienced a desire so fierce before. And the worst part of all was that she didn’t even feel guilty about it.

  You should! You just cheated on Joel.

  She had a whole list of excuses ready in the back of her mind but she wouldn’t do that to Joel. She had cheated on him. Plain and simple. And the fear and dread churning inside her only intensified when she thought about telling him.

  Joel had been all she’d known for the past three years. He was her first real love. The thought of hurting him tore at her. What if he never wanted to speak to her again? What would that do to the guild? Would they fracture and drift apart?

  The idea made her sick. They were her family. How could she have been so stupid to jeopardize that?

  She stared at Merrick’s back, the muscles rippling beneath his black sweater as he moved through the train cars like a panther moved through the forest. Her heart fluttered.

  Merrick made her feel things that, if she were truly being honest with herself, she hadn’t felt with Joel in months.

  She rested her hand against her pants where her cell phone resided. She longed to call Cali or Niella. But what if they found her act of kissing Merrick as a betrayal to Joel?

  She snatched her hand back. She couldn’t tell them. There were too many of them invested into the guild. She would have to reason it out herself.

  That was fine. She could do it.

  Merrick wouldn’t tell anyone. She had to trust that he wouldn’t tell anyone.

  He finally stopped when they reached an abandoned car. He took a seat at the furthest end in a corner.

  She hesitantly took the seat next to him. They both still smelled like those ridiculous fragrant sprays. If they wanted to gain any chance of losing Regina they needed to shower and re-disguise their scent again.

  She turned to Merrick. “I think it’s fishy that Regina just let us go.”

  “I agree.”

  “They wanted you to get a reading off Kevin’s shirt.” That much was obvious. “I think it was a setup.”

  “I know. I figured as much when they fled. Regina would have been able to smell the cop; she would have known there was only one. They could have easily taken him down but they didn’t. They used that officer as an excuse.”

  She tried to ignore the heat of his body next to hers as she thought.

  “How did they know you’d be able to read the shirt? Did you confess to Vander that you had a power?”

  His face darkened. “I didn’t confess shit. I’m assuming he had suspicions long before he captured me. He had my business records. He was putting the pieces together and I probably cemented those suspicions when I pulled that stunt on the entrance of the facility you broke me out of.”

  “I wonder what he thought you’d gleam from that shirt,” she mused aloud.

  He leaned back in his chair. “Like I said, I saw Kevin writing in a journal but his thoughts and emotions weren’t focuse
d on it. I’d probably be able to distinguish the notebook however if it was in a stack of books.”

  “Maybe that’s what he wants. Both Kevin and Collette are in a coma, which means that their possessions are probably in some kind of storage somewhere.”

  “How’d Collette end up in a coma?” he asked.

  She lurched in her seat as the BART came to the next stop. They lucked out. No one entered their cart. That wasn’t likely to happen again.

  “Felix’s Mirror Mate, Cali, knocked her out with a fire extinguisher to the back of the head,” she answered.

  Merrick cursed under his breath. “You hang out with some violent people.”

  Sydney’s smile was bittersweet as she thought about losing her guild. “They really grow on you.” Even Cali, who she’d had a rough start with, was a dear friend to her now. She wouldn’t trade any of them.

  “Like a fungus?” His voice was serious, but Sydney saw the glitter of amusement in his eyes.

  “Just like a fungus,” she agreed with a grin. “You’ll be able to meet them when we get a flight back home.”

  “We have to make it to an airport first.” The brightness in his gaze dimmed. “If you’re right and Vander wants me to pick the journal out of a group of books then that means he won’t quit looking for me.”

  She put her hand on his thigh before she even knew what she was doing. The muscles under her palm stiffened. Desire flared in his eyes. She snatched her hand back. “Look, I’m not going to abandon you because Vander is after you. I’ve dealt with that before, trust me. We have a plan, remember? We’re going to find this journal before him and we’ll destroy it. Together.”

  “And what if I want to destroy more than just a silly journal?”

  She refused to drop his gaze. “If you want a piece of Vander then I suggest you get in line.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “He came after my friends, that’s enough in my book.”

  There was a brief flash of emotion in his face but it was gone too fast for her to catch.

  At the next stop people started trickling into their cart.

  She noticed that Merrick still had his hands tucked safely away in his pockets.

  “Why were you avoiding touching anyone?” she asked.