Whispers on the Wind

by Judy Griffith Gill

  He said nothing, but continued to watch her. She took several steps toward the entrance to the cave. If she ducked and scrambled out, could he catch her? Could he force her, through imposing his will on hers, to stay? Had he truly, in that way, compelled her to come to him? If so, why? Were the Russians, or Estonians, or the Latvians for that matter, any kind of threat to her way of life? No. Not after all these years of relative peace. But why else was he sitting there naked, other than to prevent his place of origin being traced through his clothing? Surely, though, if his people were advanced enough to have perfected ESP, they’d have been able to fabricate a suit of supposedly local clothing and proper identification for their agent.

  Oh, damn! She’d obviously read too many international espionage novels from the old books Grandma and Grandpa Francis had left behind.

  She paced, stopped, one hand on the rock face, trying not to let him know how hard she was shaking. “Did you—” She swallowed hard. “Did you really compel me come to the cave to help you? Did you get into my head somehow and make me want to come to you?”

  He looked faintly wary she thought. “Yes. I did do that.”

  “Why?” Again, all she could manage was a taut little whisper.

  “Because I needed help. My strength was all but gone. I was near death and you were my best resource. Without water, without food, I was unsure I could even begin to heal myself, even with the assistance of my Kahinya. But I did not ‘force’ you to come. I offered you what you needed in return for what I needed.”

  “What I needed?” Lenore reeled away another step or two, remembering what he had offered her, remembering how willing she had been to accept it from him. “How could you possibly know what I need?”

  “It was all there. It was easy for me to see. And easy for me to allow you to see it. I thought you would be happy. I truly did not know it would cause you pain, my opening your inner spirit to your conscious mind. And I did need you to come to me. But I would never expect you to give me what I require without offering you something of value to you in return. It is not the Aazoni way.”

  “Aazoni.” All right. She gave in. He had said ‘Aazoni’, not ‘Estoni.’ She knew that. Her head spun. Dry air and open-mouthed breathing sucked moisture from her throat, leaving her scarcely able to swallow. She looked at him, sitting there so calm, so serene, so...oblivious, or maybe simply uncaring, of the violation he had perpetrated on her, that fury erupted through her body, boiled up, and spewed out as powerful and as sudden and as violent as last night’s storm.

  Chapter Seven

  “YOU ARROGANT, INHUMAN SON-OF-A-BITCH!” she said. “You got into my mind! You dipped into my private, most secret places! You intruded where you had no right to intrude! You used me, used my deepest emotions, my most basic human needs and pretended to offer me all I had ever wanted, simply so I’d bring you a drink of water?

  “All right, you bastard! I’m getting out of here right this minute! One of us is crazy, and I prefer it not to be me. It shouldn’t be hard for the FBI to locate a Greek god in his birthday suit, so good luck, sucker, I’m turning you in!”

  She dove for her pack, intending not to leave him so much as a crumb of comfort. If he’d gotten himself here in the nude, he could get himself out in the nude. He could teleport himself right back to Estonia for all of her, but she wasn’t assisting him in whatever his purpose was, being here. She snatched her sleeping bag off him.

  “Lenore.”

  His voice, soft, mellow, stopped her as she tried to stuff the bag into its case, from which she had shaken free her spare sweatshirt. She refused to meet his gaze. If he could do all the other things she suspected him of, could he also kill with a glance?

  “You are right. I can be arrogant. I am guilty of using your needs to draw you to me. You are also right to call me inhuman. But one point,” he said, and now she lifted her head, looking up at him. “You are wrong on one point.” He stepped off the ledge, took his weight gingerly on his broken leg with its crooked foot, then took another limping step. He was very close to her. Very tall. Very broad. And very, very naked. She was not a short woman. Had always considered herself ungainly. But now...she forced her gaze upward to meet his.

  “I was not,” he said, so softly she had to strain to hear him, “pretending. No Aazoni can pretend to feelings such as those of mine I shared with you, while you shared yours with me. Whatever happens from this moment on, I wish you to know my feelings were genuine. As genuine as yours.”

  Something in his eyes spoke to her with as much eloquence as his words—possibly more, and told her he spoke the truth, a truth, in his lights. At least about that. She could see he believed what he said. Her anger collapsed as swiftly as it had risen.

  “All right, ‘Aazoni,’ where do you come from, then?” she said, fighting to maintain her equilibrium, to prevent his knowing how desperately she wanted to know everything about him. She tried to inject deep suspicion, extreme doubt, into her tone. “Where is this ‘Aazonia’ of yours?” All she managed was frightened sarcasm.

  “A time and space not...here. Not...now.”

  She reared back. “Hold on! Are you seriously telling me now you’re an alien? From another planet? Or another time? Another dimension, maybe? I don’t believe you.”

  “You do, Lenore,” he said, his tone gently chiding, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders. “But it frightens you to believe it, so you deny it. You cannot deny, though, that when I called you, you responded.”

  “I...” She shook her head in confusion. Oh, brother! Had she ever responded! It should have made her blush to remember, but it didn’t. It only made her ache again with the kind of longing that just wouldn’t go away. She backed away from him and his hands fell to his sides.

  “I was weak, near death,” he said, “after my Octad broke apart. In those extremes, yours was the spark of warmth that drew me. I was trying to reach you, but I could not complete the translation to your exact location. The best I could do was bring you to me when I fell short and was injured, unable to translate again.”

  Her head careened with the effort of trying to understand, trying to accept the unacceptable, believe the unbelievable. He was tiring visibly now, and returned to the shelf of rock where he lay back without his makeshift pillow, which now lay at her feet along with her sleeping bag. “I had need of your strength. I called you and you came.”

  “Close, but no cigar,” she muttered. “You kept backing out on me just before the crucial moment.” He only gazed at her quizzically as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what she was getting at. Okay, so he probably didn’t. “Come” had several meanings, and he might not be familiar with the idiom as she used it. That he didn’t pick up on it and smirk told her better than anything that he probably was as good as his word about not poking his mental feelers into her mind. And possibly even alien...A human male of his apparent age, unless he were a particularly sheltered priest, would surely have picked up on her innuendo at once.

  “Now,” he continued, “thanks to you, I can hold my corporeal form with less trouble, and can heal myself and provide warmth and light for us both.”

  She gazed at him from near the front of the cave, aware again of the glow filling the space, light that appeared to have no source. The warmth—why hadn’t she realized before?—could not possibly be produced by her now nearly burned-down campfire. Despite the balmy temperature, chills trickled over her skin.

  “You’re dreaming again, Lenore,” she said.

  “You liked the dreaming.” He smiled. “I gave you pleasures, did I not?”

  “Pleasures!” She’d die before admitting that. “Frustrations, maybe, fears, horrors and heebie-jeebies, but not pleasures!” Her denial held as much substance as his body had an hour before.

  “It might not be the best choice of word, but you have forbidden me to share your thoughts. I must therefore take my words from...others.”

  She felt dizzy. She felt sick to her stomach. Had he been shari
ng his phantom visits with her around the community, asking what he should call her responses? Had all of Rocky Point been made privy to her erotic dreams? Would they all gawk at her when she next showed up in the community? Would Nancy Worth sell the story to one of her favorite tabs? Lenore could just see the lurid headline flashing across the screen of her reader: Accountant Has Close Encounter. Stupendous sex with alien in mountain retreat.

  “What...others?” she asked, her voice a raspy croaking sound. “What others?

  “There are not many, and the two I can best access are...weak...distant and scarcely receptive. Like most humans, they lack your...special gifts. But they would have sufficed, had you not come to me. One wants gold. With the promise of that, I would have brought him to me.” His brow wrinkled. “Why would he want gold?”

  “Gold means wealth.”

  “But he has great wealth already. He has lands, family, friends.”

  “You said two. What does the other want?”

  “Escape. Escape from...boredom. I do not fully understand this ‘boredom,’ but she does not like it. She craves adventure.”

  “And these other two. If I hadn’t come to you, would you have given the man gold, given the woman adventure?” The thought of the ‘adventure’ he could provide for the other woman gave her a momentary, powerful stab of gladness she had complied with his compulsion. Then she quickly reminded herself he did not belong to her. And that jealousy was a useless emotion.

  “I would have, yes. But first, I would have tried to make each of them see that what they already have is probably better for them than what they secretly desire.”

  Lenore stared at him, wondering if he would soon begin trying to persuade her that her secret desires were not what were best for her. As if she didn’t already know that! The idea of a woman her age yearning for a child to raise on her own was ludicrous. She knew that without his having to tell her.

  Though it was physically possible for women to bear children up into their sixties and seventies, and some did, she didn’t believe it was necessarily good. Not for the woman. Not for the child, despite a female life expectancy of one hundred fifty years.

  “So why didn’t you work harder on the others? Bring them, instead of me?” Why did you prey on my most potent desires if, in the end, you’re only going to tell me to suppress them?

  “Before I had strength,” Jon said, “there was only you for me to touch, to borrow from. Except,” he added, “for one brief moment, Zenna.” His voice cracked on the name and his face twisted with pain. “I touched her. I know I did. Then she was...gone.”

  The heartbreak in his tone echoed deep inside Lenore, an ache she could not negate. “Zenna?”

  “My birth-mate. My...sister. I touched her.”

  “Touched her? How?”

  “As I touched you.”

  Lenore felt her eyes widen. That was no way for a man to touch his sister! She heard her voice coming from a long way away. The dying fire swayed and danced and beyond it, Jon’s eyes locked with hers. “That’s sick,” she said.

  His expression of amusement told her at once he’d understood. “With my mind, with the memories shared by our Kahinyas,” he said. “I called to her, not as I called to you, but as I have always signaled her, since we were children. Aazoni families are very close. Almost all are born with a birth-mate.”

  “What’s that?” He’d said sister, but ‘mate’ could have several meanings.

  “Two infants from the same mother at the same time.”

  “Oh!” Her surge of relief came as an unwelcome surprise. “Twins.”

  “Yes. A birth-mate is what you would call a twin. But always one of each...gender. I know her signature as well as she knows mine. I recognized it, as fleeting as it was, and then it was damped so swiftly I could not find it again, to home in on. I could find only you.”

  She tried to speak, for a moment, could not, then managed, “What a terrible disappointment for you.”

  He didn’t deny it, but nodded. “I must find Zenna. I am very sorry I was forced to do that to you, sorry I had to...to take from you. That I...imposed and...entered your mind, disturbing you in the process. I did not know you would find it such a terrible...iniquity. I had no choice, if I were to live and save the others. I did not at first know you would even sense or understand what was happening. But for me, there was great need. My Kahinya needed you, the strength of your healthy body, to heal me.”

  Again, he touched his wounded head. She stared, staggered closer, looked again, and saw that the skin had knit back together neatly, that the ragged edges showed scarcely a seam. Even as she watched, the hair on his head seemed to shake itself and then lay tidily over where the gash had laid open his scalp.

  “Your head...”

  “It was a small thing.” He smiled. “Like your hands.”

  She started, turned her palms up and gazed upon their unblistered skin.

  “They are well?”

  She met his steady gaze. Again, she nodded, jerkily, then stared at his injured leg. The purple was gone, the taut, shiny skin had taken on the same bronze shade as the rest of him. As she watched, he reached down with both hands, clasped his foot and turned it straight. There was a faint clicking sound, and he smiled. “The leg,” he said, “was a little more difficult. It will be several hours before I wish to risk my full weight on it. Is there more food?”

  She backed away from him, eyes burning as she stared. Great shuddering sobs shook her, but no tears flowed. She wrapped her arms around herself, closed her eyes and prayed for sanity, for strength to withstand the terrible self doubts and mental turmoil that tore at her.

  “This isn’t happening,” she babbled. “You are not real. You are not here. You can’t read my mind. You haven’t done what I think I just saw you do. You didn’t turn into smoke and slide into the cave through a crack in the rock. You aren’t—”

  “Toor-a-loor-a-loor-a, toor-a-loor-a-lie...”

  Lenore broke off as the melodious tenor voice flooded the cave with the same kind of melting warmth as did the golden glow. Her mouth snapped shut, then fell open again. Her eyes felt as if they might bug out of her head. “What...what are you doing?” she croaked.

  Jon, sitting upright and naked, legs crossed, arms folded, smiled benignly at her. “I am...comforting you,” he said. “You are afraid. I do not wish that for you.”

  He sang again as if she had not interrupted him. “Toor-a-loor-loor-a, hush, now don’t you cry...”

  Oh, yes. Absolutely. There was no longer any doubt. She was stark, staring crazy...and sharing a cave with a man who thought he was an alien from another time and space. What was even scarier was that she believed he was, too, however much she might tell herself she didn’t. And he was an alien who thought she could be comforted by the ancient words of An Irish Lullaby?

  Lenore dropped weakly onto the ledge, stared at him as he sang, then threw back her head and laughed.

  As abruptly as Lenore had plopped onto the rock, Jon stopped singing. “My song amuses you. That is good.” He smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling charmingly. Lenore’s laughter faded to a chortle that sounded to her suspiciously like a sob. She drew in a deep breath, trying to steady herself.

  “No,” she said. “Your song does not ‘amuse’ me. Frankly, it scares me even more than I was already scared.”

  “I am truly sorry. It has never been my intention to frighten you. I hoped to soothe with the song. It is what your mother sang to you when you were an infant.”

  Lenore shot to her feet. “No!” She turned her back on him, wrapping her arms around herself. “Maybe your mother sang An Irish Lullaby to you, but believe me, no one ever sang it for me.”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding so certain that she turned back to face him. It had become hot, too hot, in the cave. She unzipped her jacket. “Your mother sang it to you. It was in your memories. You will sing it to your children one day.”

  “You can’t possibly know that. My mother l
eft me before I was a year old. She joined a commune. My father told me they all committed suicide—killed themselves—several years later, hoping to move to a different...plane of existence, I believe. And now I suppose you’re going to tell me she succeeded in that aim?”

  “I have no way of knowing. There was nothing of that in your memories of her.”

  “I have no memories of her! I don’t even have pictures of her. My father destroyed them all after she left us.”

  “You do, Lenore. Memory-pictures. They are there. Before you told me I must not, I saw those memories. Your mother looked much as you do now, but for her longer hair. She had beautiful hair. If yours were longer, it, too, would be as beautiful, too. You see yourself with hair like that. In your dreams.”

  The memory of a long, silky tress of her hair flowing over her breasts flooded into Lenore’s mind and to her disgust, she knew that this time, she actually was blushing. Dammit, she should be far beyond such juvenile embarrassment.

  The biggest problem was that she more than half-believed him about her mother, which didn’t say a whole lot about the kind of grip she had on reality. Because, when Jon spoke of a woman much like her, but with longer hair, she came close to envisioning her mother, close to regaining a memory she couldn’t possibly have. It was...tactile. Her small fists reaching up to fill themselves with handfuls of that hair, smelling its perfume, feeling its softness and...She clenched her teeth until she thought she had control of her voice, then proceeded with her questioning of this weird man, hoping for a brisk kindness that nevertheless told him she meant to be firm, meant to get to the bottom of his ridiculous story and worm the truth out of him one way or another.

  “Who are you, really?” she demanded—meant to demand, but her voice came out in a pleading whisper. She cleared her throat. “What are you? Where are you from? And don’t give me that Estonia/Aazonia crap, either, Mac. We both know it’s simply not possible.”

  He was suddenly clothed in a dark, outdoor-weight jumpsuit similar to hers, and a red ski jacket, laced up hiking boots, and leather gloves. He hadn’t moved. He did move, though, to take a black knitted cap from the pocket of his jacket and tug it onto his head, almost obscuring his hair but for a few bits curling around his ears and across his forehead.