by C. L. Quinn
Tamesine nodded. “It’ll be all right. Okay, I’ve already put you in the right place mentally. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly, deeply, remove everything from your mind and just focus on my voice. You’re in a white room, empty of everything but you and me. Listen to my voice, only my voice.”
In this state, it was all he could hear. She’d done something to him, he could feel it, but it was incredible. He felt as if he was floating above the world, airborne, in a soup of white nothingness. No, that wasn’t right, she was there, beautiful, naked, floating beside him.
In the dream-state of his mind, he looked at her luminous form.
“You’re perfect,” he said to her. “How can you be so perfect?”
Dream-Tamesine dropped into the white space and took his hand. “So are you. Here, we are all as we should be. Open up to me, and let me guide you.”
“I have nothing to hide in here.”
“That’s what we seek. Come.”
They began to walk, although Marc could feel nothing solid beneath his feet. Abruptly, a wind kicked up and they were moving through his mind, his past loomed into view. He saw the old farmhouse he’d lived in as a boy, in upstate Wisconsin, a ramshackle place with leaky doors and windows, howling winter winds, and often no heat. Indoor plumbing that rarely worked. He had been happy there, more than at any other point in his life. True, life hadn’t gotten complicated until he left there, and went to war.
He could feel his traveling companion smile as she felt his childish joy.
Just as suddenly, other images invaded and shoved the little boy’s innocent memories away. Camaraderie with young men who became brothers, late nights in drunken stupors, stupid gags that made everyone laugh, softball on sand.
And death. Horrible booby-traps designed to tear apart the soft bodies of men and women too young to have lived their lives yet. Friends, brothers, broken, fractured, gone forever. Blood, guts, and a false sense of glory.
In the dream-state, he closed his eyes. He couldn’t look. But he knew she was. He felt her inside him suddenly, and he knew she could see and feel what he had. He felt her curl around his raw pain and hold him close, and he responded by curling back around her. A warmth and peace wrapped his horrible memories and tried to ease the damaged spirit, but it could only touch it, it couldn’t affect it. Marc wanted to crawl inside the warmth and never come out.
“I’m finished,” his mind whispered to the beautiful woman whose mind was tied into his now. “Help me let go.”
Tamesine felt the depth of his pain, a mind and spirit nearly lost to it. Her own lifeforce felt his pain and winced that a young man should have ever had to have endured those losses. And while she knew her own past held terrors that had done the same to her, at this moment, holding Marc’s pain, feeling it, feeling him, she found she needed to fix all of it for him. She knew she could, once they returned from within.
The reason for their connection, though, remained elusive. Awful memories had hijacked his life. The quiet man she’d met serving drinks in a bar in a seedier part of Los Angeles grabbed hold of whatever he could handle to try to make it. He’d never wanted to be a hero. All he wanted now was a normal life.
“I can give that to you,” she whispered to him, and felt him sigh.
“Good. Take me, I should have gone with them.”
“No. I mean I can help you find peace. Alive. You don’t need to live with the pain anymore.”
He had thought she meant she would end his life. It tore at her heart to realize he believed that was where he belonged.
She needed to pull him out. As she prepared to back them into the white room, she felt them move again, past his mind, past his memories, swirling, swept into eddies of time, further, further, beyond his life, way beyond. Centuries fell away…
They stopped on a cliff, a ninety degree drop below to a dark, roiling, angry sea. Clouds painted the sky in charcoal and white, blown about by wild winds into menacing monsters. The air was cool, almost cold, and bits of moisture flew around, drawn up from the frantic waters below.
Where the hell were they? Tamesine was still wrapped around Marc, they were merged on this spiritual plane, but she hadn’t brought them here. A sick feeling struck her, as deep as any pain she’d felt in Marc…deeper.
She knew where they were, and knew they couldn’t be here, she would never have gone back. Not to that breathtaking precipice. Marc held her tightly now, tighter and tighter, as he realized she was beginning to panic.
No…not here, not on the northernmost shores of the Scottish island where her sister, her beloved sister, had slain her.
Tamesine ripped them from the memory, and bulleted them back away, back to present day, back to the white room, back to consciousness. It was a rocket ride, desperation of a powerful mind to escape. She hadn’t controlled it well.
Back on the cheap, frayed carpet in her basement apartment, Tamesine became aware of her mind, her spirit, her lifeforce, her body. She opened her eyes, and focused on her hands, clenched like chain-links to Marc’s hands. Lifting her eyes to his face, she saw his eyelids flutter, and he groaned.
He was coming around too.
Marc opened his eyes, his vision fuzzy, his head leaden. When he could finally focus on anything around him, he saw the beautiful waitress from the alley staring at him. Where the hell was he?
As he became more aware of his surroundings, he realized she was clutching his hands.
“Take it easy, you’re confused, but it will come back to you. I pulled you out of this world, and it will take a moment to acclimate. Just breathe.”
He thought her voice was perhaps one of the most lovely things he’d ever heard, and he couldn’t stop staring at her. Why did she look so familiar? Then he remembered.
“My dream lady…you’re back. I’m dreaming again.”
“I am. Only this isn’t a dream. Here, let me help you up.”
Smiling, he tried to push himself off of the floor. “I’m too big for a tiny thing like you. I’ve got this.”
Only he didn’t. He stumbled, and fell forward, shocked that the small woman took his weight easily and helped him stand after all.
“Hmm. Weight lifter, eh?”
“Not quite. Here, Marc, sit here.”
She led him to the sofa and lowered him carefully.
“What the hell did I have to drink? I feel like I’ve been on a two day drunk.”
“Just some wine. But that isn’t what is affecting you.”
Again, he noticed her watching him, almost suspiciously, like she wanted to ask him something.
“What is it?” His impatience and curiosity got the better of him.
Tamesine sat down beside him and drew her legs up to cross them again. She hesitated, then she put a hand on his forearm and looked purposefully into his eyes.
“Forgive me. Marc, you will do exactly what I tell you to do, and answer me honestly.”
He got the slack jawed look typical of a human under vampire compulsion, then answered her in a single word, which was also common. “Sure.”
“Marc, we just took a journey on the spiritual plane. Do you remember that?”
A look of confusion changed suddenly, and he nodded.
“I do now. It was bizarre. Too surreal to have really happened. Yet it did, didn’t it?”
“It happened. I took you into your past to discover why we’ve been meeting each other in our dreams. But, Marc, you took me into my past, and that shouldn’t have been possible. Can you tell me how you did that?”
“No. Whatever it is you did to take us on a tour of our memories, I can’t do that. I’m not a witch, or witch-doctor, or whatever-the-hell you think you are.”
“You’re completely human?”
“What? Well, yeah.”
He didn’t seem to have any knowledge of anything other than humans, so she knew that had to be true.
“Have you ever had anything happen that was unusual? Like something you couldn’t explain? Might have seemed beyond ord
inary or impossible?”
He was quiet. A few moments later he shook his head.
“Just what happened in the Middle East. Everything that happened there was beyond ordinary.”
“Okay. Then, I’m at a loss. You took control on a plane of existence beyond access of human beings and led me hundreds of years into my past to an event I have struggled to recall. It terrified me so much that I yanked us out before I let myself see. I don’t understand how you could do that.”
Even through her compulsion, she could see Marc as he attempted to make sense of this conversation.
“Hundreds of years? Into your past?”
“I’m sorry. I’m just confusing you. Marc, look at me.”
He looked directly into her eyes again.
“You will remember none of this conversation that happened after you awoke from our spiritual journey.”
Free from her compulsion, he became aware of his surroundings just as he had done minutes earlier when they had both come back from the merge. He watched Tamesine as she leaned in and brushed his hair out of his eyes.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
It took a moment for him to reply. His tongue felt dry and he couldn’t quite form the words. Memory was returning, and the strange walk he’d had with her through his own past, the even stranger journey far beyond his own life to hers in some very distant time and place. He wouldn’t trust any of it.
“Wow. Um, that was wild. What the hell was in that wine anyway? Psychotropic drugs?”
“It was just a very nice quality wine. No drugs, sorry. That journey was completely real, Marc. Everything we saw was real. Your past, which you shared with me. And mine, which I shared with you unexpectedly.”
She watched him process his memory of the inward experience, the vivid memories of moments in his life he wanted, needed, to forget. The reason he was lost now, and had never found himself since he came back home.
His eyes were moving back and forth as he stared down at the floor, the journey returning to him fully now.
Minutes passed as he processed what he remembered, and suddenly his eyes shot up to her face.
“I remember you, on some mountaintop somewhere.”
“Scotland. One of the northern Isles. Not a mountain, just the end of the land before the sea.”
“You were happy. And then something happened. What was it? I can’t remember, but it terrified you. No, it shattered you. It broke your heart. Someone…”
He stopped speaking as he considered what he recalled. “Your sister was there. Twin sister. I can’t see beyond that. What happened, Tam?”
Tamesine got off the sofa quickly.
“Nothing. You weren’t supposed to see that. Neither was I.”
In the kitchenette, Tamesine filled a wine glass to the brim, pulled herself up on the countertop, her legs swinging, and sipped the wine, her eyes on Marc.
He followed her and stood in front of her. “What happened to you and your sister?”
“It isn’t a memory I’ve been able to look at yet. You should never have been able to see it either.”
“Isn’t that why we’re here? Isn’t that why you insisted we do this odd thing…this merge? We’re supposed to be figuring out what the hell’s been happening.”
“I don’t know. I have to ponder on these events. Tonight has been unexpected.”
Tamesine’s gaze lifted to his face. She should purge him, make him forget tonight, forget the alley, forget the journey, forget her. And she should help him forget the memories that haunted him from the war. It would be a kindness. She knew he suffered from PTSD, to the point where it had been very debilitating in the past. She could feel that he was better now, but far from well.
Suddenly, it struck her like a thunderbolt.
Setting the wine glass on the table, she pulled him close. He fitted between her legs as she put her hands on his face like she’d done in the bar last night. He found he really liked that.
“What?” he asked.
“I know what it is. I know how we became linked.”
“Good to know. Want to fill a guy in?”
Tamesine nodded. “It’s pain.”
“What?” he repeated, for a very different reason.
“It’s pain. Most people don’t realize how powerful emotions can be. Love, hate, deep soul-searing pain. Life altering, life-punishing, pain. It moves through the spiritual plane like a pulse of energy. In all of this city, your pain and mine, which has consumed our lives, found each other and reached out. When we were at our most vulnerable, during sleep, the pain brought us together.”
“That’s insane, you know that,” Marc responded, but he barely paid attention, he was enjoying the touch of her hands on his face, and her knees against his waist, her body fitted against him exactly as he’d wanted it to be.
“Yes, it sounds insane. No, it’s not. Insane is how we have both lived our lives. I think our pain reached out because…” Tamesine paused, her mind searching, but she could only come to one conclusion. She pulled him closer yet and touched her forehead to his. “I think we may be able to help each other heal. I think the universe has put us together.”
Marc barely cared at that moment. All he wanted was to bury himself in this soft, stunning woman that was wrapped around him. His cock actually ached, it was so full.
“All right,” he finally said, barely able to recognize his own voice, he was so aroused. “I’m going to heal you tonight, if that’s okay. Right now.”
He lifted Tamesine off of the counter and carried her over to the big mattress in the corner of the room. As he lowered her, he followed her down, his body pressing hers into the softness. When she squirmed a moment later, he lifted up and looked into her eyes.
“Are you okay with this?”
She destroyed him then when she said a quiet, “No.”
SEVEN
Marc pushed himself up from the bed and surged across the room. He kept shoving his fingers through his hair as he paced near the door.
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I just got caught up in the moment. I hope I didn’t frighten you.”
Tamesine was every bit as turned on as he was. She knew now, they were meant to be together. Not necessarily sexually, but that attraction was definitely present and complicated things. In both of their cases, celibate for a long time, alone here at night in an intimate situation, both extremely turned on, it was nearly overwhelming.
She got up from the bed and walked towards him, but he backed away.
“I think I should go.” He stayed near the door, but she kept advancing. “You should stay away from me now.”
“Why? You won’t hurt me.”
“I don’t know that. I’m pretty fucked up right now. Every neuron in my brain is firing, telling me to pull your clothes off and get inside of you. I can tell you want me too, and that’s confusing as hell.”
She did. More than that, she hadn’t had her blood meal in over a week, and she wanted to pull his cock inside of her while she drunk from him. She could, if she wanted to. Compulsion would protect her identity, but she wanted to maintain the relationship that she knew she needed with this man. She didn’t want him altered or controlled.
“Come here.” Tamesine sat on the sofa and patted the adjacent cushion.
Marc stayed by the door. “Bad idea, gorgeous. I’m going to go.”
“Please…”
“I’m going to go now. I’m sorry for grabbing you like that. And that’s why I’m leaving. If I stick around here, I can’t promise I’m not going to do something like that again. So, it’s been interesting. I hope you got what you needed.”
Tamesine stepped up to him. “We’re not finished.”
Marc took her face in his hands as she had done with his earlier. He kissed her gently on the cheek, then backed away.
“Yeah, we are.”
He opened the door and disappeared into the night.
Tamesine locked the door and turned, and as she d
ropped her back against it, she sighed, a smile that lit her eyes glowed.
“No, we most certainly are not.”
Back out in the night air, late enough now that there were only a few people on the sidewalks, Marc fumbled with his keys. He could barely concentrate. His cock was trying to control him, trying to force him to head back down those concrete stairs and beg her to let him in. In. In her.
But, leaning against the motorcycle, breathing hard, he finally won the argument. A loud cough drew his attention to a car parked across the street. Expensive, for this neighborhood. Someone was behind the wheel, and Marc could have sworn he was looking toward Tam’s apartment, the only one below street level in this building.
What a fucking night of mysteries. He should just go home and jack-off, relieve the pressure of this massive erection. But his Spidey sense was tingling.
Pushing away from his bike quietly, he walked over to the other vehicle. The closer he came, the better he could see the man behind the wheel. Yeah, he didn’t like the look of him. Too fancy. High dollar shirt, hair styled, not cut, shot an arrogant sneer at Marc as he approached. The man did not roll his window down.
So Marc knocked.
A full thirty seconds later, the window slid down.
“What do you want, sir?” the man said with some kind of an accent Marc couldn’t identify.
“Yeah, just curious what you’re doing here, middle of the night, hanging around on the street.”
“I’m hanging around on the street. Perceptive, aren’t you?”
“Fine. Maybe I’ll call 911 and let them know you’re just hanging around on the street. The local cops, they don’t like that. It’s called suspicious behavior. They’re going to ask questions that they’ll make sure you answer.”
“Fuck off. You have no business here.”
Marc would welcome a fight right now. “I have no business here? I just visited my sick aunt. You wanna get out of that car and tell me again I have no business here?”
Claude pushed open the door and got out of the car, aware he was quite a bit shorter than this huge man he’d seen come from Tamesine’s apartment. But his sidearm evened the size difference.
