The Dark Gate

by Pamela Palmer

  Pain lanced her heart as her gaze swiveled to Jack. “You tackled the Esri and grabbed the amulet. It should have worked. He didn’t see you coming. All his men were firing at Harrison.”

  Jack watched her, his brows low over eyes sharp with turmoil. “Why didn’t it work?”

  “The amulet wouldn’t come off. You yanked on the stone and tried to pull the chain over his head, but it wouldn’t lift. It wouldn’t budge.” Grief clawed at her insides. “He turned the cops on you. Three cops shot you in the head.”

  Her pulse pounded in her throat as she waited for their reaction. They stared at her, then at one another, then at nothing, the air in the room thick enough to spread on toast. The silence suffocated.

  Larsen wanted nothing so much as to turn tail and run, but she’d done too much running. Too much hiding. If they threw her out, so be it. She’d told them what she had to. The ball was in their court now.

  Harrison’s gaze zeroed in on her. “You see people before they die. Before these attacks.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “That’s why you were at the Kennedy Center, isn’t it? In your scarf, yelling about a bomb in the building. You knew we were going to be attacked.”

  “Yes.” Larsen’s heart shriveled.

  “I saw you in the lobby. I caught you staring at us. Yet you never tried to stop us. You let me take my kids into that theater knowing—knowing—someone was going to try to kill them.” With each word, his voice rose in volume and anger. “He hurt her. He stole the laughter from her eyes. And you could have stopped it.”

  Larsen began to shake beneath his righteous anger, the guilt of twenty years raking her from within.

  “Hold on just a damn minute,” Jack said. “Do you really think she could have stopped you? Think, Rand. What would you have done if a strange woman had come up to you in the Kennedy Center and told you that you and your kids were going to die if you took them to see The Lion King? Give me a break. You’d have thought she was nuts. You’d have ignored her. Scorned her.”

  Harrison made a sound of denial.

  “You know you would have. That’s why she couldn’t tell you. She knew what you’d think of her.” He turned to look at her. “It’s the reason you never told me what you were seeing, isn’t it? The reason you’ve hidden your gift all these years.”

  “It’s no gift,” Larsen said vehemently.

  “Of course it’s a gift. You’ve just potentially saved all our lives. Our plan isn’t going to work. Now we know.”

  Larsen met his gaze, watching him with wonder, feeling the passion of his defense like a strange, unexpected and wonderful present. He understood.

  Harrison sat still as stone, his expression brittle, but controlled. “You’re right. I wouldn’t have listened.” His gaze moved to encompass the others. “We need to come up with another plan.” He sent his brother a pointed look. “One that doesn’t involve your team. It’s clear you’re one of us, Charlie—one of the ones who can’t be enchanted, otherwise he wouldn’t have turned your men on you. Welcome to our team, brother.”

  With a grimace of resignation, Charlie turned his chair backward and straddled it, leaning his arms along the back. “All right, then. Back to square one.”

  Harrison glanced at her. “Have a seat, Larsen. You’re going to have to keep us on track, based on what you’ve seen. How many cops were there?”

  Charlie jumped up in a single fluid motion. “I’ll get some paper. We’ll need to understand their positioning. Larsen, I want you to draw us a map.”

  Myrtle leaned over and patted her arm, beaming at her. A fragile warmth bloomed inside her, thawing the cold knot of fear and self-loathing she’d lived with most of her life. They believed her. She remained cautious. Wary. But the emotions stirred and stretched within her on this first tide of acceptance.

  She sought out Jack and found him watching her with enigmatic eyes. He nodded his approval, a single, brief tilt of his head, and she knew she’d done the right thing by telling them.

  They needed the information she could provide.

  But as her gaze fell from Jack’s eyes to the arms he’d crossed on the table in front of him, she knew true acceptance might be nothing but a dream.

  The hair on his arms was standing on end.

  Chapter 17

  The sun hung low in the western sky, painting the clouds with a palette of pinks and golds. Jack paced the small apartment, tense and wired, full of a frantic energy he could barely contain. After Larsen’s revelation, they’d spent more than an hour coming up with another plan.

  But changing the plan in no way guaranteed they’d change the outcome. They were probably still going to die.

  Jack turned from the window to find Larsen sitting on the overstuffed chair, watching him. Love for her swelled inside him until he thought it would burst from his chest. She was so beautiful. He never looked at her that her beauty didn’t stroke something to life deep inside him. She filled him with wonder, and a deep, aching fear that he wouldn’t be able to keep her safe.

  “We need to talk,” he told her.

  Henry snored softly from the sofa where he remained tied. Myrtle had long since gone to bed. Harrison and Charlie were out rounding up the supplies they’d need for the midnight offensive.

  Jack crossed to the coffee table and sat on the sturdy piece, facing Larsen.

  She eyed him warily. “About what?”

  He reached for her hands, then clenched his in fists and pressed them to his knees. She was psychic. He’d said he was glad, and he was, but the knowledge unsettled him on a primal level. His skin tingled every time he thought about it.

  Her gift had been the missing piece of the puzzle. Once she’d confessed, the rest had fallen into place. Her lies and subterfuge made a perfect kind of sense now that he understood what had driven her.

  His gut had told him to trust her. Rightly so.

  He gazed into those brown eyes and saw the future. A future he longed for with an intensity that took his breath away. A future he might well have no part in.

  “Larsen, if we fail, it’s up to you. You’ll be the only one left to stop him.”

  Her mouth tightened. “I know. I’ll do whatever I have to.”

  “You’ll foresee more deaths. You’ll have to stop them, recruit the unenchantables to help you in this fight.”

  “I’ve thought about it, too, Jack. It’s all I’ve thought about since that vision.” Emotion overflowed her eyes. “What am I going to do if I lose you?” she whispered.

  His heart clenched. “Larsen…” He rose and reached for her hands, pulling her into his arms.

  “I thought you were afraid to touch me.”

  “I always want to touch you,” he said as his lips covered hers. She melted against him, all the invitation he needed. His fingers slid into her hair, his mouth slanted over hers. Fire flared between them, rising like a geyser, freeing passion denied through secrets and misunderstandings. Passion he didn’t think he could douse again.

  “I want you,” he said against her lips.

  “Still?”

  “Always.”

  He swept her into his arms and carried her to the empty bedroom. They might not have a future, but they had tonight and he intended to spend every second he could touching her, making love to her. With frantic, desperate movements, they shed one another’s clothes and fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and flesh and kisses.

  “Jack…I want you.”

  Love and desire wrapped around him, pulling him from the mire of their impossible reality, depositing him in a place where there was only sensation, heat, joy. His lips found her bare shoulder where barely a scar remained from her arrow wound of just days ago. Magic.

  He wanted to memorize every scar, every otherwise perfect inch of her. Memorize every taste. His mouth skimmed lower, closing over her breast until he could suck the soft flesh into his mouth, sending heat driving through his body on a sharp lance of need.

  She arched again
st him, fire beneath his touch. The looming showdown lent a desperation to their love-making. They both knew tonight might be their last. Her hips began to rock against him, a moan forming deep in her throat, sending his need for her shooting skyward.

  With a last slow twirl of his tongue, he released her breast and moved down her body. His lips grazed her taut stomach as he slid his hands between her thighs and pushed his finger deep inside her.

  “Jack…” She writhed against his hand, her fingers raked through his hair, sending a sharp, unbearable pain knifing through his head. Jack reared back, gripping his skull.

  Larsen rose on her elbows, realization sweeping through her eyes. “Your head. Oh, Jack.”

  “It’s okay.” But the tiny spears continued to tear through his brain.

  She pressed her knees together and scooted to a sitting position, wrapping her arms around her updrawn legs. “This is all my fault,” she said miserably. “I never should have tried the ritual without telling you.”

  “What ritual?” He gripped his head, then a shiver slid down his spine as he remembered her startling revelation. She was psychic. He lowered his hands slowly, the pain remaining in the level of mere sledgehammer instead of shooting fire, and met her gaze.

  “Larsen, what really happened this morning? I know you get premonitions of death, but that was different.” An unsettling thought hit him. “Were you able to see into my mind?”

  Her mouth twisted into a sad smile. “No. I’m not a mind reader. Not exactly.”

  Now that his head was no longer in danger of exploding, he found his attention sucked back to the beautiful, very naked woman sitting in front of him.

  “What are you…exactly?” He reached for her, lightly gripping her wrists and pulling them outward to free her knees.

  She lifted a brow, but didn’t fight him. “Psychic is as good a word as any, I guess. A heck of a lot better than the evil I’ve always used.”

  “You’re not evil.” With her hands out of the way, he parted her knees, pushing them open like the petals of a flower, revealing a perfect, nectar-filled center. Blood rushed to his groin, his breaths becoming labored. “What were we talking about?”

  “What happened this morning.” She sounded like she’d just run a two-mile race. “It’s a little hard to explain.”

  “Try.” The word left his lips, but at the moment he wasn’t sure he cared. He was finding it harder and harder to pay attention to anything but the treasure in front of him. He grasped her crossed ankles and moved them out, spreading her open until her damp, heated sex was all he could see.

  “Do you remember…Myrtle…telling us about her great-great grandmother who claimed to be able to talk to her a-ancestors?” Her words stumbled as his fingers started a slow, deliberate ascent from her ankles. “Jack…I can’t think.”

  “Talk, sweetheart. Tell me everything.” He leaned forward, his mouth following his fingers’ path until his tongue dipped to the soft flesh behind her knee.

  Larsen gasped. “They locked her up for it.”

  “I remember,” he murmured, licking and nipping. Rising toward her center. “Keep talking.”

  “I think it was…real, Jack. I think…she—” he kissed her inner thigh and the slender crevice at the top of her leg “—she could talk to her ancestors through her mind. And I think you have the same gift.”

  His mouth covered her sex at the exact moment her words tore through his mind, but the sweet taste of her drove out all thought but one. Larsen. He drank of her, teased her with his lips and tongue until she was quivering and shaking with the need for completion.

  “Jack…please.”

  He needed one of the condoms he’d bought when he was out that morning, but he rose from the bed too fast, sending a barrage of agony through his head. He gripped the bedside table until the worst of it passed. Then he carefully removed one foil wrapper from the box and turned to find Larsen sitting up, watching him with worried eyes. She took the condom from him and patted the pillow.

  “Lie down. Let me do the moving…unless you want a rain check.”

  He reached for her, running a single finger around one taut breast. “No rain check. I’m okay.” But he was beginning to wonder how he was ever going to be any help to anyone tonight.

  Carefully, he lay on his back on the bed. Larsen scooted beside him, then slid her hand ever so lightly over his erection, watching his face.

  He scowled. “You’re not going to hurt me.”

  “Good.” Watching him, never taking her gaze from his, she slowly lowered her head and placed a kiss along his rigid length. The brush of a butterfly’s wings, yet seeing her lips on him like that sent blood surging through him, hardening him almost beyond bearing.

  “Larsen…”

  With a sexy, challenging grin, she rose and straddled his hips, her sex poised over him, drenching him with heat. She met his gaze, her eyes filled with lust and devilish joy and he’d never anticipated anything more than those slender hips starting their downward slide.

  Her fingers rested lightly on his abdomen as she dipped to touch him, brushing the tip of him against the very door to heaven.

  “Baby…you’re killing me.”

  “Wimp.” She gave him a siren’s smile and with a sexy little wiggle of her hips, took him inside. Her smile turned to ferocious joy. An exact mirror of his own as her tight sheath welcomed him. “Do you…want me to keep talking?”

  “No,” he said, even though he’d heard clearly the note of teasing. He grabbed her hips and shoved up into her at the exact moment she fell on him again. Heaven. His groan was echoed by her sharp cry of pleasure. Over and over they drove their bodies together, joining deeper with every thrust.

  She closed her eyes and threw her head back, like a mermaid breaking water, sounds coming from deep in her throat that nearly drove him insane. She was so beautiful. So perfect. His angel.

  He gripped her hands and felt them tighten in his as she gasped, her hips rising and falling at a frantic pace. Her gasps turned to low moans, the pressure building in his own loins until he was about to explode.

  Suddenly her sheath tightened around him, squeezing him in hard, loving spasms as she cried out and flew, taking him with her. As she settled back to earth, she met his gaze through unshed tears, and smiled.

  Love for her filled him beyond bearing. He wanted a future with her. He wanted…something. Anything. Everything. And he suddenly understood his father’s marrying despite his affliction. The right love was worth all risks. Impossible to ignore.

  He pulled her down to lay against him. As he stroked her back, his mind returned to the conversation that had been hijacked by lust.

  “Did you really tell me you think the voices in my head are those of my ancestors?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She rubbed her cheek lazily on his shoulder.

  He’d had to accept some weird stuff the past couple of days, but this one…no way. “They’re just noise, sweetheart. Noise that sounds like voices. I’ve been hearing them all my life.”

  “They’ve been communicating with me.”

  The hand stroking her back stilled midstroke. “What do you mean by ‘communicating’?” How many more secrets did the woman have?

  “They’ve been showing me things. Through my visions. Other visions—not the ones that foresee death.”

  He stared at the top of her head. “Just how many visions have you been having?”

  She lifted her head and met his gaze. “Too many.” She rolled off him, then stood and reached for her clothes. As she dressed, she continued. “I think your ancestors were able to communicate with me through whatever sixth sense I possess that gives me my death visions, or premonitions, or whatever you want to call them. I think that may be why the voices in your head quieted whenever you touched me. Your ancestors were trying to communicate with me. They were trying to tell me how to help you. They taught me the words that should have let you understand the things they were trying to tell you, but it didn’t w
ork.”

  Jack sat up, then grabbed his head. Damn. The pain was getting worse by the hour. At this rate he was going to be completely immobilized—pathetically useless—by the time midnight rolled around.

  He forced his mind back to her words. “The ritual. That’s what you called the thing you did to me by the creek.”

  “Yes.” Standing in a wash of light from the setting sun, her skin took on a golden glow even as regret shadowed her eyes. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  He sighed. “I know.” Her words slowly pierced the walls of his brain. “You really think they’re my ancestors?”

  “I really do.”

  “It’s insane.”

  “So is foreseeing death. We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

  Beneath the press of her revelation, his understanding of his madness shattered, forming and reforming, sliding into a new and wholly foreign shape. Mind whirling, he reached for her and pulled her down beside him on the bed.

  “Why didn’t the ritual work?”

  “I’m not sure.” She squeezed his hand. “You may be too old. Or I might have screwed it up.” She wrinkled her nose and met his gaze with wry apology. “I think I was supposed to warn you not to fight it. Instead of letting you finish, I called you back.”

  “I was sinking.” Just the memory of his fall into that black hole threatened to cut off his air.

  “I know. I couldn’t leave you like that.”

  “If you hadn’t…if it had worked…? What then? The voices would have started speaking English?”

  She pulled one leg onto the bed and turned to face him, taking his hand in both of hers, her gaze on his fingers. “All I know is that if the ritual had worked, you should have been able to understand them. They’re supposed to be able to help you—guide you or give you advice or something.”

  “There are dozens of them in here. I wouldn’t be able to hear one for the others no matter what language he spoke.”

  “That’s just it, Jack.” Her dark gaze rose to his face. “I think they’d all be silent unless you called them.”