by Lark Brennan
His tone, deadly serious and resigned, gripped her gut with alarm. He was prepared for a shootout that could leave them both dead.
“We do this together,” she said and took a post behind the door, pistol braced in both hands.
He fixed her with his silver gaze and for an instant she thought she saw tenderness there before his eyes flashed ice.
“Shit,” he said and reached for the doorknob.
Chapter Fourteen
Bodie’s heart thumped loudly in his chest. It was unlikely he’d already been tracked down on Jost Van Dyke, which didn’t mean he hadn’t been spotted back in Road Town.
“Step back,” he hissed at Lex.
“Open the damn door.”
He raised his massive pistol, turned the knob and jerked the door open.
The scruffy young man standing on the porch jumped back in surprise.
“Who the hell are you?” Bodie demanded.
“Shit, Serge,” Lex barked. “You almost got your head blown off.”
“You know him?”
Serge shook where he stood—dirty hair, barefoot in grimy shorts and a ratty AC/DC t-shirt.
Lex lowered her weapon. “More or less. He’s a regular at Stanley’s.” She spoke to their visitor in rapid French.
Bodie uncocked the Desert Eagle and shoved the barrel into the waistband of his cargoes, while the wide-eyed Frenchman stared at him.
Lex grabbed their visitor’s arm to get his attention. “Come on, Serge, focus. Why are you banging on our door in the middle of the night?”
The guy finally recovered his wits. “Stanley said to come get you. One of the dolphins beached itself.”
Whatever she muttered in French garnered a look of surprise from ole Serge. “Okay. Let me throw on a bathing suit and get some equipment and I’ll be right there.”
The Frenchman nodded then scurried down the steps to his transportation.
Bodie chuckled. “Sorry about that.”
He turned to find Lex studying him. “You seriously thought we might die tonight, didn’t you?” Her tone was curious rather than frightened.
“There was a possibility.” Just as there had been every time he encountered a stranger since he’d opened the door to his condo in Boston that night. He waited for her to flinch or show some kind of alarm. He deserved a tongue-lashing for putting her in danger.
Instead she folded her arms across her chest, Beretta dangling from her right hand, and leaned against the wall. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “From now on, you’re straight up and honest with me. If we’re going to keep you alive, no more secrets that can get either of us killed.”
“Agreed.”
“Wherever we go, we’ll be armed. Maybe that cannon of yours can stay home.” She nodded at the handle sticking out of his waistband. “Got anything smaller, something more discreet?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. He had to hand it to her, the woman had guts.
“Good.” She pushed away from the wall. “Now get dressed and meet me at the jeep. We have a dolphin to check out and I may need your help.”
Lex strode across the living room, all business now. His body remembered how she’d felt naked and wet and aroused. He shook himself and headed for his room.
• • •
The huge gray body lay motionless in the sand. Bodie hadn’t been able to judge how big the dolphins were from the plane and even his brief encounter with the female at the beach hadn’t prepared him for the ten-foot marine mammal.
Lex reached the dolphin first. “Well, well. What are you doing here?”
“Is it my girlfriend?” he asked.
“No. One of the boys who attacked me this afternoon. Chuy. The one who rammed me.”
“How do you know?”
“The piece missing from the top of his fin and the transmitter attached at the bottom.” She crouched next to him to touch the gray skin and rested her hand on his head.
As the seconds passed, Bodie guessed she was doing her telepathy thing and waited. The animal’s visible eye was closed and he didn’t move at all when she ran her hand down the side of the huge body.
Touching the beast who had tried to kill her that afternoon didn’t strike him as a brilliant move. Then again, he didn’t know jack about sea mammals. “Is he alive?”
“Definitely but he’s unconscious. If he was a land species I’d say he was asleep,” she said thoughtfully.
“Funny place to nap.”
“Dolphins only sleep with half their brains at any given time. The other half stays awake to keep them swimming and breathing. Otherwise they’d drown.”
“Right. So what do we do now?”
“Get him into a sling and keep him wet until he wakes up or the Ariel arrives.” She continued to stare at Chuy. “I can’t tell if he’s dreaming or his subconscious is remembering. Images are flashing in there like a rapid video collage. By the time I recognize something, his mind is two or three images ahead.”
He squatted next to her and propped one knee in the sand. Without even touching the dolphin he felt the presence of intense negative energy. Nausea hit him square in the stomach and he had to force himself not to back away. “He’s been contaminated—it’s like he ingested red orphic.”
“Is that possible?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Gently, she stroked Chuy’s head. “Something scrambled his mind.”
“How do these guys usually think?” Not a question he’d have ever considered asking before this morning.
“A lot like we do. Perception, recognition, processing. They’re surprisingly analytical about their world and self-aware.” She frowned and chewed on her lower lip. “I’m getting the impression he believes the GPS he carries for us caused whatever happened to the pod.”
Lex stood and brushed at the sand clinging to her knees. “You inflate the sling. I’ll get the clippers to remove the tracking device.”
They unloaded the gear without talking. Lex used both hands to work the clippers. The pin snapped and she carefully wriggled it out of the fibrous flesh of Chuy’s fin, releasing the GPS device.
Maneuvering the huge gray body took both of them. Bodie inflated the pontoon to float at the edge of the water, avoiding touching the dolphin as much as possible. Pushing and tugging, his head pounding and stomach rebelling all the way, they managed to get the dolphin into the sling. They then used the buoyancy of the waves and brute strength to pull the sling into the water so the other pontoon could be inflated.
With his blowhole above the water, Chuy could breathe and his skin could be kept wet. With Bodie and Lex on either side, they walked the dolphin into the water until they were hip deep.
Lex stroked the bottlenose’s head. “You go get some rest.”
“I’ll stay. This dolphin tried to kill you. What if he wakes up and is still pissed off?”
Her attention remained on Chuy. “I’m going to try to calm his mind while he’s asleep. It’ll be easier to concentrate if I don’t have any distractions.”
“You can do that? Go into his mind and alter his thoughts?”
Her fingers grazed the wound where the tracking device had been attached. “I don’t know. I have to try.” She looked up, her eyes filled with sadness. “Dolphins are highly intelligent and extremely intuitive beings. Chuy’s visions or memories or dreams, whatever’s going on in his head, tell me he believes the tracking device was responsible for hurting his pod. I can’t ignore that possibility.”
“Are you getting any information about what happened?”
“Bits and pieces. Chuy has no frame of reference for the experience.”
Bodie understood that feeling. “Do you?”
She dropped her gaze back to the dolphin. “Maybe.”
“We’re a team here, Lex. I can’t help you if I don’t know what happened to your friend out there.”
“I used my empath senses to probe beyond his visions to the sensations he felt.” She drew a deep breath. “A vor
tex sucked the pod into what appeared to be another dimension or plane of reality.”
The scientist in him wanted to demand details, back-up, proof. He shut that skeptic down. “Okay. That’s pretty scary.”
She shrugged. “Not in itself, it isn’t. Remember these guys live in the sea and yet they’re aware of our land-based world. They move constantly so their environment is always changing—the sounds, the light, the food, even the taste of the water. The other plane was so alien, its elements bore no resemblance to a dolphin’s experience of earth. What’s more important is how Chuy felt. The fear and despair of the other dimension were completely new to him as was the truth he instinctively knew, even if he had never encountered it.”
“Like we felt at the red orphic?” A deep foreboding gripped Bodie’s lungs. He tried to brush it off with annoyance. “Okay. So what exactly drove him crazy enough to want to kill you?”
“Pure evil and sixty-five minutes in hell.”
Her words hit him like a shotgun blast to the chest—an all too familiar experience. “Impossible,” he choked out.
“You don’t believe me?” she snapped. “Or you don’t believe him?”
The water lapping at his hips rocked the sling and he adjusted his stance to keep from being pushed over. Was it possible? He stared at Lex, who stared right back with a whole lot of attitude.
“I believe you both,” he said.
She studied him. “You know what happened to Chuy and the others?”
Nothing about Lex was soft or submissive now. The no-nonsense set of her mouth, the intensity of those dark blue eyes made it clear she wouldn’t accept a bullshit answer.
He took a deep breath. They were in this Twilight Zone together now. “Remember me telling you I got laughed out of Princeton?”
She nodded.
“My discovery of delphic energy was only part of the reason.” He hesitated, but the proof lay unconscious under her hand. “I came to believe there were different planes of existence that were separated by properties of the delphic energy.”
“Did you have any proof?” she asked.
“No, it was only a theory. Once I started perfecting the sensors, I concentrated on them.” At Mark’s insistence, come to think of it.
She nodded as though every word he’d said made perfect sense. “And after you died, you had a whole new set of problems to solve.”
An odd warmth spread through his body. Nobody but Durand had ever accepted his wild-ass ideas before and here she was totally getting him. “Yeah, I began sensing orphic, too, and had to figure out how to measure its good and malevolent variations. You know how crazy we sound, right?”
“I’m going to throw something out,” she said, “and I want you to listen before you say anything. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“I think the red orphic he absorbed at the spot where the pod disappeared is the reason Chuy isn’t responding to my telepathic manipulations. We both felt what it did to us in the plane and it must be much worse having it inside him. As long as he’s saturated, I don’t think he can shake the horror.”
“Makes sense.”
Shifting her footing, she rested both hands on the pontoon and gazed down on the huge gray body that floated between them. “I also think you may be able to push the bad orphic out of him with your mind if you try.”
“That’s impossible. Nobody can push energy with their mind.”
“I can,” she said. “But only certain delphic and only in one specific place.”
He tried to beat down the cynic in his brain that screamed she was putting him on. “How? And why only one place?”
Her teeth scraped over her bottom lip. “I can’t explain how in words, only guide you the way I was directed the first few times. I’ll have to project the feeling of controlling the energy into your mind.”
Lex in his head? “No. You’re not projecting anything into my mind.”
“Why not? I can teach you to do things, things that might help you.”
The vision of his mother shooting flames at her lover flashed in front of his eyes. “I have an active imagination and not much stomach for supernatural power.”
“What I can teach you is no more supernatural than your ability to sense the energy. These dolphins need your help,” she insisted.
“Sorry.”
Her expression softened. “Why are you frightened, Bodie?”
He wasn’t going to bare his soul on the Mommy Dearest horror show of his childhood. Better to ask his own questions. “Where is the place you can channel energy?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“No shit. And you’re avoiding answering.”
“You could figure it out if you thought about it.”
“You want me to let you into my mind but you won’t tell me about your own ability? I’m not feeling much give and take here.”
She shrugged. “I told you I’m an animal telepath. But I’ve never told anyone outside the Protectors what I can do and nobody’s ever seen…” She hated to remind him of what went down in Road Town, but figured he wasn’t forgetting that incident any time soon. “Nobody except Adrien has ever seen me project sensations on somebody else.”
Adrien Durand—Mark’s cousin—now controlled the Durand global business empire from Paris. Bodie had hypothesized a cloaked European delphic fount. Was it possible? “Is there a delphic energy concentration in Paris?”
“I’m not authorized to give you that information.”
Authorized his ass. “Then we’re at a stand-off. You don’t trust me and I don’t trust you.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you exactly. Telling you more than you need to know will put you in danger.”
“Some government assassins killed me once, and the minute they figure out I’m alive they’ll probably try to do it again. I’m willing to risk a little more danger.”
“Then why won’t you let me teach you to drive the evil out of Chuy?”
“Why can’t you do it yourself?”
“Because I don’t sense orphic the way you do. I was affected by the red spot, but I only experienced the symptoms not the energy itself. I can only show you what I feel when I channel the delphic. Won’t you at least try?”
Before he could answer, headlights appeared on the road above the cove and slowed. Two open-topped jeeps bounced down the dirt drive headed toward them.
“Damn it,” she muttered. “Why does he always show up with a posse?”
Latham descended the steep path to the beach followed by three young men. “We got a call that one of the dolphins beached itself. Who is it?”
“Crap timing,” Lex muttered under her breath, then addressed Latham. “What are you doing here? We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.”
“We’re early.” David waded knee deep into the water and stopped. “Chuy, isn’t it? I want to do an exam and get a blood sample.”
“Yeah, and he’s the one who came after me this afternoon,” she said.
“So you tranquillized him?” David’s tone held disapproval and Bodie wasn’t at all surprised when Lex got indignant.
“Give me some credit,” she snapped. “He’s unconscious, just as I found him. All I did was check for injuries and remove his tracking device. As far as I can tell, his vital signs are okay.”
David gestured to the guys on the beach and one approached with what looked like a plastic tool kit. “Without any medical equipment, that’s just a guess. I brought a full kit so Mac and I can take over from here.”
Lex didn’t move but Bodie saw her hands tremble on the inflated pontoon. If her assessment of Chuy’s mental state was accurate, no amount of veterinary care was going to fix him. And after his own experience with red orphic, he agreed that the energy in the animal was probably causing his violent behavior. Not a diagnosis they could share with Latham.
David approached the slinged dolphin and ran a hand down its back. “Good night, Lex.” He threw Bodie a dismissive glare be
fore directing his attention back to Lex. “You’ve done what you can, so go get some sleep.”
Lex’s eyes flashed fury. “No.”
“No?” Latham asked indignantly. “You’re tired and there’s nothing more you can do for him tonight. Let us relieve you.”
“All right. We all want what’s best for Chuy so I’m conceding his care to you for now. Tomorrow we talk when I get back from flying Bodie to Road Town.”
David nodded. “We’ll have a full report by then.”
She glanced down at the unconscious dolphin and ran her hand softly down the side of his head and rested it there. All of her concentration focused on the bottlenose and her body visibly tensed.
Watching her, Bodie wondered what she was seeing in Chuy’s orphic-tainted mind. How could she delve into the evil so fearlessly? Her jaw muscle tightened as though she was resisting pain and she shivered. He closed his warm hand over her cold one.
“Let’s go,” he said gently.
“Not yet.”
His hand tightened over hers and followed her gaze down to the dolphin. His pulse ricocheted when he saw the open eye watching them.
In one powerful motion the massive gray body flipped out of the sling. The force of the pontoon shoved her off her feet and under the water.
“Lex!” he gasped and dove for her. One of Chuy’s fins caught the side of his head propelling him backward.
The world went dark.
Chapter Fifteen
The sun had been up for over an hour when Lex knocked on Bodie’s bedroom door.
He was fully dressed in a wrinkled blue cotton button-down shirt, khaki shorts and boat shoes. “Ready to go.”
“How about some coffee first?” she asked.
“Sounds good.” He moved past her and into the kitchen. “Can I pour you some too?”
“Mine’s on the table.”
He seemed deep in thought or annoyed. From the scowl on his face, she suspected the latter. “The Ariel has a great cook. We can eat breakfast there if you want.”
“No.” He peered inside the refrigerator. “Where’d the OJ come from?”
