JUMP (The Senses)

by Cindy Paterson

  “No. But thanks. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I’ll be out like a light.”

  “So Tuesday? Pool, beer and wings?” Jedrik called before she slammed the door.

  Why not? Jedrik had proven to be a selfless and entertaining guy to be around. “Yeah, sure.”

  Jedrik waited until she was in the front door before he drove away. She closed and locked the door then leaned up against it. Her purse slipped off her shoulder and fell to the floor.

  She sighed. Solitude. No sounds. No smells.

  Her head pounded. Headaches were a common occurrence after a flashback. She pressed her fingers to her temple as a wave of pain hit her head as though someone had taken a hammer and struck her with it. Nice. Another night of debilitating throbbing.

  Advil had become her best friend.

  Then she heard it. The voice. His voice. Air sucked from her lungs.

  “Little one.”

  Her stomach dropped into a bottomless pit, and tears gathered as the voice sang those two words to her. She knew them—he’d called her that in her dreams.

  Her knees gave way and she slid down the length of the door until her butt hit the cold floor. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. No, he was a figment of her imagination. He was in her head. It wasn’t real.

  Shivers racked her body, yet suddenly warmth penetrated her skin, flaming hot like the sun beaming down on her in the middle of summer.

  “Do not be frightened, little one.”

  “Holy crap,” Danielle cried out, head raising, eyes scanning her darkened gallery. That was so real. Someone was here. He was here. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve and crept to her feet. This was bullshit; someone was screwing with her head.

  She slid her arm along the wall and felt for the light switch, while she kept her gaze fixed forward, searching for any movement or sound.

  She felt his presence, heard him breathe in and out, calm and gentle. She tasted his scent on the tip of her tongue—earth. Familiar warmth invaded her body, but nothing prepared her for the shadow moving across the room. Her fingers searched desperately for the light switch, but it was—

  She froze. Paralysis was possible when frightened out of your skull, she concluded. Her legs refused to listen to her mind, which said “run”; instead they were like icicles frozen in place.

  He emerged, soft footfalls unhurried and precise across the hardwood floor, eyes hidden by the shadows, but she didn’t need to see his eyes to know what they looked like. She knew every inch of them, the slight droop in the corners, lashes curving upwards at the tips to give the impression of gentleness. The green surrounding the black pupil was bold and bright, a mixture of lime and the greenest leaves in the middle of the rainforest. If she closed her eyes she could see inside them, the haunting rage and sorrow churning together to emit a tumultuous expression. He existed inside her, a part of the blood that rushed like a river through every vein, every vessel.

  He stepped into the moonlight that shimmered through the front window. She gasped as those vivid green eyes penetrated her with an intense heat. Her heart skipped a beat and for some reason she felt relief dance across her mind, a comfort that she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Two years, to be exact.

  Her arm dropped, lights forgotten as she stared in thrall at the tall lean man from her portraits. He halted a few steps before her, bold, strong and proud, his shoulders like a barricade stopping her from any thought of escape. But she wouldn’t escape. No, she’d been desperate for answers about this man for two long, tortured years.

  “Who are you?” Danielle asked, surprised that her voice even worked. She licked her lips to moisten the dryness and his eyes followed her. She jerked it back in her mouth. “Who are you?” she repeated, raising her voice.

  Her insides coiled like a jack-in-the-box ready to spring free with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation, uncertain whether he was going to leap on her and shred her to bits, or take her in his arms and soothe away all the hurt with a single touch. She prayed it was the latter, but she doubted this guy had any sweetness in his mind right now. Haunted eyes, sad and filled with anguish. It swam through her insides like a wave drifting in and out of her veins, filling the emptiness inside her body with his pain.

  Her hands ached to reach forward and feel every crevice on his face then sift through his hair and touch the dark walnut strands. She inhaled and his earthly scent caused tremors to sprint across her skin.

  Hair? Dry hair? No, it should be wet. She always painted him with wet hair, and yet tonight it was dry, dancing across his head in soft waves.

  “No, this is wrong.” Danielle shook her head, trying to clear her vision. She was going crazy; he wasn’t standing in front of her. She was imagining him. Holy crap, they’d put her in an insane asylum if she ever told anyone she’d seen the man in her paintings.

  “Danielle.” His husky voice gave her body a jolt as if a shot of electricity.

  With every breath she inhaled his scent. “Tell me why I know you?”

  His expression sobered further, eyelids drooping down and his lashes lowering. His brows drew over them and he appeared to be scowling, yet she felt sorrow emanating from him.

  Then to her utter astonishment, as his head lowered and he turned away, she caught the sight of one glistening tear fall down his cheek. Her heart broke into tiny fragments, an overwhelming pain descending upon her, and she had no choice but to touch him.

  He stepped back and she reached out for him, curling her fingers into his coat. The contact was so soft she was afraid he wouldn’t even notice. Heat shot through her, warmth surging, her cheeks flushed and lips parted as she held her breath.

  “Don’t, little one,” he said, but he remained still.

  Only one word came to mind. “Please,” she whispered.

  Several seconds of hesitation and she was afraid he’d walk away, leave her again like he’d done before. Even if she had no recollection of the memory, she knew he had left her. He had walked away, but whether it was her choice or his she had no idea.

  He swung around in one fluid motion, his arm encompassing her waist into a forceful embrace. Her heart drummed, as he stared at her, one hand splayed across her lower back, the other reaching up to cup her chin and tilt her head up to meet his eyes.

  “You told me to stay away. I’ve defied your request, for that I apologize.” His words flowed like melted chocolate across her mind. “Leave me in your past, little one. I am damned. We are destined to be apart for all eternity.”

  Danielle’s mind screamed no, every fiber in her body screamed it, yet she was speechless. She didn’t know who he was or why he was here. Yeah, all those W questions again. God, maybe he’d had something to do with her abduction? Was it possible? Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome.

  His voice changed to a rough growl. “No. Never. To hurt you would end my life.”

  His thumb stroked across the cleft in her chin as if it was natural and he was unaware that he was doing it at all. Her abdomen tightened and her knees weakened as she reached up to find the tear that had once graced his skin.

  Wetness clung to his cheekbone. She had the urge to kiss it, sweep her tongue across the flesh and taste his skin in what she knew would be the most erotic thing she’d ever done. Why? Why was this man driving her insane with these emotions? What had happened between them two years ago?

  His head lowered, eyes delving into her with a fierce abandon, intense, dangerous and dark. His lips parted and she moved up on her tiptoes, needing to be closer, wanting to feel him, taste what was within inches.

  She closed her eyes, knowing he was going to kiss her. And she wanted him to. God, she wanted him to. The knowledge leapt through her like a tidal wave crashing against rocks. She desired a man again. This man.

  His arm tightened on her back, locking her against his broad chest. She heard his heart skip a beat and then take on the same rhythm as her own. When her head tilted back, his lips
came down on hers with a potent intensity.

  ****

  Uncontrolled desire ruled his thoughts, seeking the one thing he’d denied himself for two hellish years. A feral lack of restraint swept across his mind, heating his skin to a fire that would be impossible to extinguish. Her lips plied easily beneath his demanding assault, opening to his tongue as he tasted what he had to have. Her. This woman. An immense cavalcade of emotions shot through him.

  He’d tried since the day he walked away to forget her eyes, those fierce, resolute cinnamon eyes that had turned into ones of torment. Every time he closed his own, he pictured her, his little one, a free spirit who’d once soared with the birds but now was ensnared in a deadly trap. He needed to free her. End this for both of them.

  Her hands came up between them and she laid her palms on his chest beneath his open coat. He groaned begging for more yet knowing it was hazardous. He was undeserving of such a remarkable woman.

  But he needed her, goddamn it.

  Her tongue boldly swept into his mouth, and his insides erupted with a wild possessiveness. His hand pushed on the small of her back, needing to feel her body up against him, never getting enough, as if he were drowning, sucked into an abyss of pure rapture. Without this woman he held protectively in his embrace, he was a lost soul.

  ****

  She was falling into an oblivious heat of mind-numbing passion. Any common sense had been blown up with a stick of dynamite when he pulled her into his arms. Now, under his expert hands, his hard, worldly mouth, she found what she’d been missing. She craved to touch his skin, feel the muscles that were like mountains and valleys merging into one another under her fingertips.

  All her senses were overflowing with him, the touch of his velvet tongue, the taste, a mixture of scotch and something sweet, the sound of his breath hard and fast to match their heartbeats. And his scent . . . it was erotic, soap and earth.

  His kiss moved down to her chin, and she tilted her head back further, eyes closed, afraid to open them and discover that this was all a dream. A wine-induced dream.

  “Little one,” he murmured against her ear, his tongue flickering across the lobe sending shots of desire between her legs.

  Not wine-induced. It was real. He was real.

  His hands gripped her on either side of her neck and his lips trailed slow warmth down the column of her throat, tongue darting out to lick and kiss her skin. She moaned as heat swept across her sensitive flesh.

  It was the slightest graze of his teeth. A nip on her throat that caused the flash of horror to come barreling into her like a punch to the stomach. She cried out, scrambling from his encompassing embrace, staggering backwards, hand pressed to her throat as a familiar feeling came over her, so frightening that her legs gave out and she crashed to the floor on her backside.

  He came towards her, hand outstretched, and she scuttled backwards on her palms until her back hit the door. “No, don’t.”

  He stopped dead in his tracks, arm lowering. The hurt that swept across his features was unmistakable. Eyes closing for an extended second, mouth drawn, the outer corners drifting downward.

  The pulse in her throat danced, a foreboding tension constricting her muscles. She kept her fingers on the spot, knowing that it meant something but unable to decipher what. She’d had strange puncture marks there when she woke in the hospital, but still she had no recollection how they came to be. And neither did the doctors.

  “I apologize,” he said, hand sweeping through his hair in a frustrated gesture. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  Danielle was speechless. Her confusion between what was happening to her now and what had happened then meshed together to make a bewildering puzzle that refused to fit together. She didn’t want him to leave—he couldn’t leave her again.

  Please end my pain, she begged.

  His eyes flashed a deeper green for a split second and she saw the rage within, that single lethal expression, before he turned abruptly on his heel.

  He was walking away. Leaving. No, he couldn’t do that to her. The man in the painting, the man she had grown to know, his voice, his scent. He wouldn’t walk away a second time.

  “Don’t you dare leave me,” Danielle shouted as she scrambled to her feet. “Don’t you do this to me, damn it.” She ran after him as he kept walking and flung herself at his back, slamming her fists into him, pounding his muscles as tears of frustration ran down her cheeks. “Two years. Two years I’ve waited for you.” She had no clue why those words came out, but it sure as hell felt like they fit.

  He halted, spine stiff, hands clenched into fists at his sides, taking her assault without any attempt at stopping her. She punched his back again and again with half efforts to hurt him the way she was hurting inside, yet wanting him to turn around and take her back in his arms and hold her, protect her like he had once before.

  He jerked. Muscles flexing as if he sensed what she thought.

  She stopped, her hands still on his back. “Why did you come? To torment me?” Her voice was ragged. “I’m already tormented. I live in it day and night. But you can take it away, can’t you? You know what happened.”

  She heard him take a breath, felt his heart beating, strong and rhythmic like a clock. The tears stopped, yet inside she continued to cry, for herself, for him—for them.

  Both had suffered, she knew this like she knew her own name. He’d protected her somehow, that was how she felt whenever she looked at his picture, protected, sheltered in his embrace as if he’d done something to stop the suffering. What though? And why?

  Without turning around, he spoke. “Forget me, little one.”

  “No. I can’t. Tell me,” Danielle said, her voice a jagged whisper. “What happened to us?”

  “You’re better off forgetting.”

  Danielle’s spine stiffened. “Don’t you dare tell me what I’m better off forgetting. You came here, so bloody well explain why.”

  “So you’d know I was real,” he said.

  “Look at me.” Danielle grabbed the back of his coat, wanting him to spin around and face her. “Damn it, look at me,” she said, her voice rising.

  But he didn’t, instead he walked away.

  She refused to go after him; her dignity was too great to do that again. Instead, she stood staring, her body jerking as the back door slammed and the uneasiness came swirling around her once more. It was as if this veil had been lowered over her while he was present, then it lifted and again she was immersed in her own hell. Alone. Afraid. And desperate for him to come back.

  She kicked the legs of her easel and it crashed to the floor. Her scream of frustration bellowed into the air.

  ****

  He leaned up against the door, body shaking, heart pounding, breath in short gasps. He cringed, a pain shooting through his heart like an arrow as he heard her scream. The impulse was strong to bolt back inside, pull her into his arms and cradle her. If he’d turned around, he would’ve been lost in those eyes, seeing the pain. Walking away had been his only option. If he told her what had happened, what he was, her life would be in jeopardy. No human could have knowledge of the Senses.

  Why had he come tonight? Why cause her more grief than she already had? He felt her anguish, the anxiety of contemplating that she was going insane. He had to give her one sense of reality—that he lived. She wasn’t imagining him. Would she be able to move through her past now? Or had he just made it worse?

  God, the thought of her free spirit being swept up into the heavens, never to be found again, made him sick to his stomach.

  The undomesticated part of him craved to be released and run, feel the elements, be free from the constant guilt that sucked him under with every breath he took.

  He sighed, a ragged sound undistinguishable even to himself. Never had he sunk this low.

  The past two years had been hell, as he fought the malicious blood that ran in his veins like poison. Any Senses warrior knew what the tainted blood did to you, destroyed your vir
tue, made your thirst for blood so strong you’d do anything to relieve the agony; kill any in your path in order to claim their blood. That made it pretty damn important never to do as he had done. Still some refused to comply with the laws and risked death for power and control. He’d betrayed his kind, but luckily, so far, he’d escaped death and the power of the vampire blood he had consumed.

  Most vampires were soulless maggots who had no qualms about killing. Actually, they had no qualms about doing anything despicable. Living with the constant thirst for blood made them a threat to humans, and it was the Senses’ job to make certain that didn’t happen. But that wasn’t the only war they had to fight on this earth. The CWOs, Center World Others, were always rising from beneath the ground, and they were still trying to figure out what capabilities they possessed. He’d encountered several during his two years of running from the Senses and the Wraiths who governed them.

  He’d nearly crossed over to the draw of the vampire blood that ran through his veins, eating away at all his morals and values. It was Danielle who kept him sane. Her strength. Her voice. Scent. God, everything about her.

  He’d been running from Waleron—his Taldeburu.From Danielle, from everything he had ever known. The Senses had nature’s gifts from the five distinct senses, and he’d only managed to avoid capture because he was a Tracker. He could smell emotions for miles and, more important, he could scent another warrior, which always gave him a head start. He excelled at covering his tracks and hiding his scent. Just like his father.

  They had searched for him, hunted him, but he’d managed to avoid them by constantly moving, keeping to areas that were concrete and laden with humans. Never had he stayed in one place longer than two days. A few times, Waleron had nearly caught up to him, damn near put the gold bands on his wrists, which would’ve been the end of his freedom. How he escaped Waleron, still bothered him, because it just didn’t happen.

  Now Keir and Jedrik knew he was back, and that meant Waleron would be notified. His betrayal wouldn’t be taken lightly. He would have to stand before the council and face the possibility that he’d be killed for what he’d done. Yeah, well, he deserved death. But this was his chance to prove to the council that warriors could fight vampire blood after consuming it. Death wasn’t the only choice for them.