Trouble In Mind (Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2)

by Donna S. Frelick

  Lana showed her credentials and watched the girl’s eyes grow round with surprise. “I’m Special Agent Alana Matheson with the FBI. I wonder if I could ask you a few questions?”

  The girl swallowed. “Sure. I guess.”

  “We’re looking for some folks, a young woman and her six-year-old son. We think they might have been in an accident or had a breakdown somewhere out here maybe yesterday afternoon or evening.” She pulled out the picture of Asia and Jack she’d been showing around all morning. “Any chance you’ve seen them?”

  To give the girl credit, she looked at the picture. A lot of people didn’t bother.

  “No. But I wasn’t working last night. I went home at lunchtime and my dad took over.”

  Gabriel had been prowling the aisles, stopping and listening as if to far-off thunder. He lifted his head to catch Lana’s eye and gestured for her. She excused herself and went to join him back by the drink cooler.

  “They’ve been here.” He pitched his voice for her ears only. “Yesterday evening at the latest. They were alone, though. No sign of the kidnappers.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Gabriel. If they’d escaped, why didn’t they call? This place must have a phone, access to the police?”

  He lifted his shoulders. “All I can tell you is what I feel. They were here.”

  “Shit.” She ran a hand over her tamed curls. “Okay.”

  She plastered a smile back on her face and went back to the girl. “You say your dad was here last night? Where is he now?”

  “Um, he’s at a big elders’ meeting, I think, way out on the res. He won’t be back home until late, Mom said.”

  “Is there any way we can reach him out there? It’s important.”

  “Well, no, I don’t think so. There’s no cell service out there and Miz Twohawks doesn’t have a phone.”

  “You do have a phone here, though, right?”

  “Sure, yeah. I mean, usually. It hasn’t been working for the last few days. The guy’s supposed to come and fix it today or tomorrow.”

  Lana and Gabriel exchanged a look. Gabriel got to the question first.

  “Can you tell us how to get to Mrs. Twohawks’s place?”

  The girl looked broadsided by the question. “Uh. Yeah. I guess. Well, you are FBI and everything, right?”

  “You want to see the creds again?” Lana lifted an eyebrow in inquiry.

  “No, that’s okay.” The girl set her shoulders as if she’d made up her mind. “The old lady lives a ways from here, I don’t know, maybe an hour? I can show you on the map. I’ve been there a few times with my Mom and Dad.”

  Gabriel unfolded the map and laid it out on the counter, and the girl showed them. They committed the route to memory, stocked up on water and snacks and left her to her TV and A/C.

  As Lana slid behind the wheel, Gabriel ducked his head into the car. “I just remembered something. I’ll be right back.”

  She watched him go back into the store, the muscles moving like water under his tee-shirt and jeans. Sudden desire speared through her chest, taking her breath in a gasp. Her mind was filled with the memory of his mouth on hers, hot and demanding, his skin under her hands, his voice deep and warm in her ear. He had filled her, stretched her, stroking deep and slow until she begged him, begged him. Oh, God, she wanted that again. More than her stupid pride. More than her life.

  What in the living hell is wrong with me? She shook her head, rubbing her hands down her face. She had never felt this way about a man before. She had to get away from him before she did something insane.

  Gabriel came back out of the store and folded himself into the passenger seat. He glanced at Lana with a frown.

  “You okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” The repeated question was getting on her nerves. “What was it you forgot?”

  He twisted the top off a bottle of water and guzzled half of it down. She watched his throat move as he swallowed and felt her own mouth go dry. Damn it to hell!

  “We couldn’t risk anyone else learning where Asia and Jack are.” He shrugged. “Now the girl just won’t quite be able to put together the details the way she did for us. No harm done.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Anger rose up into her throat and choked her. “You went into that girl’s mind—just fucking blew right in and took what you wanted! Just like you did with me.”

  She would have said more. She wanted to say more. But he turned with surprising quickness and grabbed her arm.

  “No! No, Lana. This was deliberate. It was business. I skimmed the surface of her mind and erased a few minor details that are of no consequence to that girl. What happened between us was different.”

  She shook him off. “You told me it went against your personal code to enter a person’s mind without permission, then you jumped in mine with both feet. How can I trust anything you say?”

  “You tell me.” His eyes blazed with dark fire. “Open your mind, Lana. Open your heart. You have to know what happened between us affected me as much as it affected you. A lifetime of training broke down that night—you saw what I endured to build those shields and they were gone in seconds. Think. What kind of emotion must exist between us to do that?”

  He cursed in frustration and scrambled out of the car, slamming the door behind him. Lana followed him as he paced across the sun-washed lot, gravel crunching under their boots.

  “What the hell, Gabriel! You’re just going to throw that at me and walk away?”

  He turned on her. “What’s the use? You won’t listen. You won’t see. Just like so many other things in your life you refuse to look at. You hide them in a dark corner of your mind, thinking you’ve dealt with them. But let me warn you. My brother is a master at finding those things and turning them into monsters.”

  She came to a halt and stared at him. “What the hell does your brother have to do with this? And what things? What are you talking about?”

  Gabriel paced in the ragged shade of a few stunted pines, caught between anger and some emotion she could not identify. “I hurt you. It was the last thing I wanted to do, and I’m sorry. But I didn’t extract your deepest secrets to cause you pain. I didn’t magnify your fears until they destroyed you. I didn’t make you relive your mother’s death until you lost your mind. I am not my brother.”

  He was shaking now, and Lana finally understood. He was not only furious at her, he was afraid for her.

  “You think Kinnian is after me?”

  “I think if Kinnian ever found you, you would learn what mind rape truly is.”

  She met Gabriel’s gaze for a long moment. A depth of knowledge pooled like a black, limitless sea just below her conscious mind. Dangerous things swam below the surface.

  “You’re nothing like your brother.” She started to turn away. “And you don’t have to worry. I got over my mother’s death a long time ago.”

  He grabbed her hand. “You need to look deeper, Lana.” The way he was looking at her made the bottom drop out of her stomach. “If we hope to defeat Kinnian, you can’t hide from what you know.”

  She pulled out of his grip. “And what is it you think I know?”

  “There’s a connection. I know you feel it. All those moves you made as a child, from city to city, from state to state. What was your mother running from all those years, Lana?”

  She wanted to scream in frustration. “Why would it matter what the hell she was running from? She was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who ended up killing herself. End of story.”

  “And what if the story was more complicated? Did you know that your mother was the patient of a doctor in Nashville named Claussen? Eighteen months ago this Claussen was . . . prosecuted . . . for selling the records of his patients to a black ops agency of the government. Asia Roberts was one of his patients.”

  “Asia Roberts . . .” Oh, hell no. “Are you suggesting my mother might have had some kind of psi talent? And someone was trying to kidnap her?”

  “You’re an inves
tigator. What does the evidence suggest to you?”

  She stared at Gabriel, unable to process what he was telling her. She could only tremble in shock. All those years of running, her mother wild-eyed with fear at every knock at the door. Never allowing Lana a friend; never allowing herself a moment. Until time had finally run out. Lana had always believed what everyone had told her, what it had looked like, for chrissake. Her mother was crazy. But what if she’d just been trying to stay alive? What if, like Asia Roberts with Jack, she’d been trying to keep her little girl out of the hands of a deadly enemy?

  She didn’t want to speak, but the words wouldn’t be stopped. “You’re saying this case is related somehow to my mother’s death over twenty years ago.”

  “I think the same organization that kidnapped Asia and Jack was after your mother, yes.”

  And the suicide . . . NO. She refused to think about that. The whole idea was too much.

  She blew out a breath. “See, that’s the problem, Gabriel. You put all this fantastic theory together from looking in my head. And you should never have been there in the first place.”

  Gabriel stared at her for half a second. Then he exploded.

  “Christ, yes! I admit it! I’ve already apologized for what I’ve done. But what I saw in your mind is a part of me now. I put that together with what Ethan knew, and I did some digging. That’s my job, Lana.”

  “No, Gabriel, your job is to help me find Asia and Jack. I’m not part of your investigation.” She turned and strode back across the bleached gravel toward the Jeep. She’d had enough of Gabriel Cruz and his high-minded bullying.

  She heard his boots on the gravel behind her seconds before he spun her around to face him. “If I ‘investigated’ you it was only to learn how to protect you. We’re running out of time, Lana.” He stopped, took a breath. “The closer we get to Asia and Jack, the closer Kinnian gets to us. I feel him even now.”

  Lana looked up into Gabriel’s face. New lines had appeared around his dark eyes.

  “Okay.” What was it he’d said about fighting like children? “Okay, I get it. Maybe I could let some things go. And maybe from now on we could set all this personal bullshit aside and just focus on the job.”

  She could see Gabriel struggle with himself. Clearly her solution wasn’t quite what he had in mind, but he set his lips in a thin line and nodded.

  They made their way to the vehicle, and Lana slipped in behind the wheel. She pulled out of the parking lot, put the A/C on blast, and headed into the sun.

  A few miles down the valley highway, Gabriel looked up from his map and pointed. “Take this next right.”

  “What? It’s not even paved.”

  “That’s what the girl said. The map has it going almost to the old lady’s door.”

  Lana cursed under her breath but took the turn, grateful she hadn’t let the rental car agent back in Little Rock talk her out of a four-wheel-drive. The road began to climb right away, lifting above the desert floor with its patches of broom grass and occasional cactus into hillsides dotted with piñon pine and juniper. The lowering sun gave it all the surreal golden glow of a John Houston Technicolor. Too bad the plot of this movie was something more out of Sam Peckinpah, Lana thought. Or maybe Quentin Tarantino.

  Lana shut down her fevered thinking and focused on the here and now. The questions Gabriel had raised—about her lost childhood, her mother’s sanity—had no answers. She should know, she’d been asking them long enough. She just followed the twisting gravel and red dust of the road and let it take her higher, over the broad breast of the mountain.

  A much-abused Ford F-150 passed her as she came down off the crest of the ridge, crowding her to the outer edge of the narrow road. But once she got past the highest point the road widened for a bit, the result of recent maintenance, perhaps. The trees were a little thicker on this side of the mountain, too, and came closer to the road. It seemed cooler for a while, or were those clouds gathering for an afternoon thunderstorm?

  The road was winding down the mountain into another little valley, dry, but protected on all sides by low mountains. Lana could see a number of homesteads below, ranches with livestock and barns, with houses or trailers and here and there a traditional Navajo hogan. She had read somewhere that people still used them for ceremonies, though she didn’t think anyone still lived in them. Still, who knew? She’d run into some cabins back in the hills of Tennessee that were so primitive they might have been unchanged from Davy Crockett’s time.

  The road was growing rockier, the trees had thinned out and thunder was rolling over the shoulder of the mountain now. She exhaled. Maybe she should have let the big man drive. She glanced over at him, thinking Gabriel had gone awfully quiet. He was staring sightless at the road ahead of them.

  “Gabriel? You okay?”

  His only answer was a low murmur of words she did not recognize and the same uncanny stare.

  “Hey! You’re starting to worry me here, spaceman. What’s going on?”

  His words emerged as a kind of chant, repeated over and over. What the hell was he doing? Then he fell as silent as death, his eyes closed, and he went boneless and limp in the seat.

  “Holy shit! Gabriel?”

  She didn’t dare take her hands from the steering wheel; she couldn’t risk looking away from the road for more than a few seconds at a time. The road had become a one-car track snaking its way around the mountain in a tight series of hairpin curves. Steep and unrelenting, the curves worked their way down, with only the battered, rusting guardrail between life and disaster. There was no place to pull over, no way to stop.

  Lana heard Gabriel moan and glanced at him in alarm. His hands were fists, his body one taut mass of muscle. His eyelids were fluttering as if he were dreaming. Was he having another attack like that day at the rest stop? With a searing, white-hot slash of pain she saw what he had seen that day, she felt what he had felt—the ripping invasion, the unbearable agony. And for one perilous second her body was no longer her own. Her hands went numb and unfeeling on the steering wheel. Her eyes went blind except for a vision of that face, the face of an enemy so implacable, so fearsome, fighting him seemed impossible.

  She heard a sound—the crunch and pop of gravel underneath the car—and with a start of horror her eyes flew open. Jesus Christ Almighty! The front right tire was at the edge of the precipice. There was no guardrail at this spot, nothing to keep the Jeep from going over, and down that side was nothing but a thousand feet of brush-covered mountain slope. In a panic she swung the wheel to the left. The Jeep slewed sideways, all four wheels spinning and skittering in the gravel. She fought with it, ended up back on the right shoulder again, and slid into another tight curve. She tried the brakes—the tires spun for a few desperate seconds before they caught and began to slow her down. Then, thank God, the road eased out of the last of the hairpin curves and hit a short straightaway.

  They were still high above the valley floor, and beside her Gabriel was pale and unresponsive. She was shaking so badly she could hardly trust herself to take the vehicle off the road and park it, much less guide it through another series of those damn death curves. With a grateful exhale she spotted a wide semi-circle of red dirt at the start of the next bend. She slowed with exquisite care and pulled into the rough sanctuary. Trembling, she shut off the engine and turned to deal with Gabriel.

  She touched his shoulder. He was rigid and unyielding, his muscles clenched tight, a fine sheen of sweat over his skin. His belly and chest rose and fell with rapid breaths, as if he was running a marathon, and his face wore an expression of predatory concentration. She almost withdrew her hand, afraid to disturb that magnificent focus. But she felt compelled to warn him. Because somehow she knew that just as this dreaming hunter was stalking his prey, something else was stalking him.

  He arched in the seat, his back bowing and twisting, the tendons in his neck pulling as tight as bowstrings. A sound emerged from him, more animal than human, a growl, a howl of frust
ration. And he collapsed into huge, wracking tremors, a seizure that threatened to break his bones and tear him apart.

  “Jesus, Gabriel!” Lana scrambled from her seat and straddled him, grasping his flailing arms to keep him from crashing through the car window. She hit the lever to lower the seat to give them room, even as his spasms threatened to throw her sideways into the gearshift. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the seizure stopped. Panting, she looked down at his face.

  He wasn’t breathing.

  “Oh, God, Gabriel. Don’t you do that. Shit! No! Don’t you do it!”

  She hitched herself higher onto his hips and centered herself over his chest. She put her palms over his heart and leaned in, feeling the whole car shake with the force of her compressions. She counted out loud, to keep from thinking of anything else.

  “One, two, three, four, five, come, on, you, bas, tard, don’t, do, this, to, me, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” She gave him a breath. Then she felt for his pulse. There it was—weak and thready, but there.

  She sat back on his hips, staring at his chest as it lifted—once, twice.

  His body dissolved from beneath her, replaced by cold, gritty stone. Vertigo spun through her head as the Jeep disappeared from around her and left her alone on her hands and knees in a dark so complete her vision starved for light. She would have screamed, but she could find no breath to bring to it. Instead she could only cower, there in the dark and the cold, struggling to understand what had happened.

  “Gabriel!” She wanted to shout, but it came out a whisper, and the silence threw the name back in her face. Somehow he’d brought her here, or she had followed him, and whatever danger he was in was hers now, too. That thought provided an anchor for her untethered mind, and gradually her frantic heartbeat began to steady, her breath began to slow. She raised her head, and at last she could see the outlines of walls, a tunnel carved out of living rock, its sides narrow and jagged.

  She stood, her legs shaking, and listened. There was a constant, bone-deep booming of surf against stone beneath her feet. A sharp sizzle-and-crash every few minutes that seemed to fill the whole cavern. And there! the distant clash of metal, and the mutter of male voices. She stretched out a hand and began to move toward the sound.