Seduce Me in Dreams

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “Got it,” Ravenna said softly as the lift doors opened to let off a slew of hotel guests. She walked into the elevator and pressed the button for the twenty-second floor. Fallon pressed the twenty-fourth floor button.

  Fallon took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind for what promised to be a very difficult trick. He would start to be able to get into the minds of the people on the twenty-third floor from as much as a floor away, but no matter how slow they made the elevator go, it would still be a random grab for minds that might or might not be there.

  The floors came racing up, and the elevator stopped at twenty-two. No one came or went, and the passengers in the car grumbled at the delay. Then the doors closed and the lift moved on. Ravenna was so focused on watching Fallon concentrate that she didn’t realize that the elevator had stopped again until Fallon’s eyes flew open with an expression of utter fear dilating them.

  Ravenna looked up to see the former admiral they were chasing as he stepped onto the lift. He was about Bronse’s height but clearly much older. A distinguished older. His close-cut white hair was as neat as every stitch of clothing he wore. He held one hand in the other and turned to calmly face the front of the lift. He was accompanied by two large and very obviously armed men. Bodyguards.

  Ravenna couldn’t believe this was happening. She was standing right behind the man who had tried on at least three occasions to kill Bronse. This monster had sent a killer into her home, a beast with a gun who would have killed her and an innocent child as well as Bronse—and for what? For what possible reason?

  She wanted to grab him and demand the answers. She wanted to use her mind and throw the lot of them down the elevator shaft and be done with them once and for all. Her anger was so hot and so consuming that she had to struggle to control herself. Especially because Fallon was there, white as a sheet, afraid for his life and hers.

  No doubt afraid for Bronse’s and Lasher’s lives as well. The minute JuJuren stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby, the risk of his identifying Bronse and Lasher was high and dangerous. The armed men he had with him didn’t look like the type to care about their targets. Laser fire would start to fly, and innocent people would get hurt.

  But Rave couldn’t speak to warn the men. JuJuren was practically on top of her and would hear her.

  “Rave? What’s going on?” Bronse asked in her ear for what she realized was the second time. “Ravenna? Answer me, damn it.”

  “Excuse me, do you have the time?” she blurted out suddenly, touching the former admiral on his sleeve to get his attention. It earned her dirty looks from the guards, but JuJuren lifted a hand to call them off.

  “It’s just about half cycle,” JuJuren replied, looking her over slowly and carefully. Ravenna suppressed a chill as she realized that it was a very male appraisal. She could imagine the thoughts going through JuJuren’s head based on Fallon’s angry expression alone.

  “Something’s wrong, she’s not answering,” she heard Bronse direct to the team.

  “But she’s clearly not in trouble,” Lasher returned.

  “Or in trouble but can’t speak up about it,” said Bronse. “Damn it, someone got on the elevator with them!”

  She loved him. Oh, what an insane moment to realize it, but Ravenna knew in that moment of uncanny insight that she was simply mad about Bronse Chapel. Everything about him thrilled her, from the sublime to the sexual, and right now it was the keenness of his intellect that she truly adored. With a passion. Her relief that he understood was profound, even as her epiphany about what she felt for him was shockingly overwhelming. She’d never been in a relationship before, never mind found herself in love. And she knew there were dozens of complications involved, and that she didn’t have the luxury of thinking about a single one of them in that moment.

  “You’re not from Tari, are you?” JuJuren asked as he eyed her strange coloring and exotic features. Tarins were much more rugged, and a lot less likely to be as poised and graceful as she came across even when she was standing in a resting stance.

  “Shit! That’s JuJuren!” she heard Bronse hiss in her ear.

  “No. I’m from Ebbany,” she said with as much casual ease as she could muster. She glanced at the indicator and saw the floor numbers rapidly dwindling as the elevator headed for the lobby. They should have gotten off on the twenty-fourth floor as instructed, but she and Fallon had been taken completely off guard by JuJuren’s sudden appearance.

  “A hard place to grow up. But I like it there,” JuJuren mentioned.

  “It’s a beautiful and dangerous world,” she replied.

  His smile was smug, but his eyes had a glint of temper in them. “Not dangerous enough,” he muttered.

  He had no idea that she understood the reference. Nor did she care. All she wanted to know was what she and Fallon were going to do.

  “What floor are they going to?” Bronse demanded.

  Ravenna turned to Fallon with a smile. “How about that lobby downstairs? Have you ever seen anything so big in your life?”

  Fallon mutely shook his head, knowing the remark wasn’t meant for him.

  “Vivi! Get your ass in here double time!” said Bronse.

  Through his earpiece Bronse could hear the sound of someone fumbling, and then he saw Vivi running and breathing heavily as she raced into the lobby.

  Bronse grabbed her by her arm and led her to the elevators.

  “Stop the elevators. Right now. We need to buy some time.”

  Vivi reached out and pressed the call button, closing her eyes as she wrapped her power around all the thousands of electrical impulses and currents in the building that were connected to that one single point. Nervous and panicked as she was, her finesse went straight out the window, and the entire hotel went suddenly black.

  The elevator slammed to a halt, jolting everyone inside and making two of the passengers cry out. Now Fallon and Rave were trapped in an elevator with two, possibly three armed men and a murdering son of a bitch besides.

  “Power outage,” one of the bodyguards said with a shrug. “Should come back soon.”

  “Strange, the emergency lights aren’t on,” JuJuren said. Rave didn’t need Fallon to grab her hand to be made aware of the suspicion lacing JuJuren’s voice.

  “First floor! First floor!” Bronse commanded into his mike as he yanked Vivi after him and headed for the stairs. “Trick, the minute the electricity comes back on, you override the elevators. Make the one that Rave is on stop at the first floor. I won’t do this with a crowd behind me. We’re going to have zero body count. You got that?”

  “Copy that,” Ender and Justice chimed in.

  “Pulling the program up now. How much time before the electricity comes back on?” Trick demanded.

  “It’s recharging as we speak,” Vivi said breathlessly.

  Bronse ran up the stairs two and three at a time, Lasher and Vivi hot on his heels as the men both drew their weapons and kept them low against their bodies. The stairwell was pitch-black, but they used the rails to guide them straight to the door to the first floor. Once there, Bronse pulled Vivi to a halt.

  “Now, you stay right here and do not move,” he ordered her, gently moving her into a corner surrounded by laser-proof stone walls and metal. Vivi nodded enthusiastically, having no desire to do anything but stay way out of trouble. By the same turn, Bronse needed her close at hand in case he needed one more delay if Trick couldn’t override the elevator in time.

  Bronse and Lasher left Vivi there just as fluorescent lights flickered on one by one, starting with the emergency lighting.

  There was a collective sigh of relief in the elevator when they came on and then a common shout as a sudden surge in power sent the lift jolting back into motion. Out of the corner of her eye, Rave saw the first-floor button suddenly light up as if an invisible hand had pushed it. Trick had worked his magic and now the elevator would stop and there would be a confrontation on the first floor instead of in the
lobby. The only problem was the other people in the lift; Fallon and Rave were standing right behind their would-be target.

  Ravenna stood ready.

  “Ravenna, you let us handle this, you hear me?” Bronse ordered over the earpiece. “I don’t want you using your telekinesis unless you absolutely have no choice. The last thing I need is three armed men and a woman with no moral compass to boot. You got it?”

  There was no way she could reply and Bronse knew it, but he sensed she’d heard him loud and clear. He and Lasher stood to the sides of the elevator doors, waiting for the lift to arrive and the doors to fully open before they would drop on JuJuren and his men.

  “We’re coming to you, Commander,” Ender said in staccato breaths. He and Justice had raced across the roof to the access door and were now running flat out down twenty-nine flights of stairs.

  Ding.

  The doors to the elevator opened, and Bronse and Lasher leapt forward in tandem, each pointing a gun in the face of the very startled admiral.

  “Stay very still,” Bronse warned the men as he eyed them down his sights. He was forced to ease forward, to put a foot in the way of the doors so they wouldn’t shut and let their quarry escape.

  It was hard to stare at the face of the man who had tried so hard to kill him yet somehow manage to keep from pulling the trigger. But he did it just the same, looking forward to JuJuren’s long, hard road to justice. Bronse wanted to see Rave, to pull her out from behind the men, but the squirrelly and halfhearted way the men raised their open hands toward him was making him nervous. Instinct told him that these were desperate men about to try desperate measures to get free. But first he wanted them out of the elevator and away from Fallon and Ravenna.

  “Come on. Out,” he said, nodding to the two frightened passengers to JuJuren’s right. “Now run away.” They did, not bothering to look back. “Stop twitching,” he warned the bodyguard on the right, “and get your fucking hands in the air where I can see them.”

  The guard obeyed. But the three men kept sharing shifting looks, which gave Bronse a sick feeling in his intuitive gut.

  “Chapel,” JuJuren drawled suddenly, “you’ve been nothing but a pain in my ass since the day I met you. You’re lucky your promotions weren’t up to me or you’d still be a half-baked sergeant somewhere in grunt land.”

  “I’m lucky a lot of things weren’t up to you,” Bronse retorted sharply. “Now step out of the elevator.” Frankly, he didn’t give a damn about the two guards. But the last thing he needed was hired guns running loose on JuJuren’s side. And where the hell were Justice and Ender?

  “You know,” JuJuren said slowly as he took a step in the slowest of strides, “it’s really hard to believe that some stupid grunt like you was responsible for fucking up my whole life.”

  “Oh, I think you took care of that all on your own,” Bronse replied as he stepped back away from JuJuren as far as he could while still keeping the elevator doors ajar. He handed off the covering of JuJuren to Lasher and then turned back to focus on the men in the elevator. Now that JuJuren was out, he could see Ravenna standing still and quiet against the back wall of the lift, her body shielding Fallon’s protectively. But the last thing he wanted to do was let the armed men know that he had people he cared about within their reach. “Now you.” He indicated the bigger of the two. Unfortunately, keeping his attention in the elevator meant turning his back on Lasher and his prisoner.

  “I want to know how someone as dumb as you managed to figure out what I was doing.”

  Bronse unwittingly rose to the bait, but not the way JuJuren intended.

  “And I want to know what I did that makes you want to kill me so badly.” Bronse took his eyes off his target for one split second to look back at the admiral, and that was all it took.

  The beefier of the two guards reached out to grab Ravenna by the throat, nearly yanking her off her feet as he dragged her body across his front, protecting himself with her.

  Pandemonium broke loose in the form of yells and shouts. A round of swearing bolted through them and then the anticipated threat.

  “You drop those guns or I’ll break her fucking neck like the little delicate twig it is.” The guard yanked back hard on Rave, dragging her up his chest and off her feet until she gagged beneath his strangling hand.

  “Hey!” Bronse could barely think even as he shouted the word at the guard. “If you hurt her, I swear I’ll blow your head off!”

  “If you don’t drop those guns, I’ll rip off hers.”

  Ravenna was choking, trying to suck in what little air she could, her feet flailing almost a foot from the floor by then. She knew she didn’t have time to waste. Lasher and Bronse would never be able to choose between her life and taking JuJuren to justice. They would eventually concede to his demands and let him go—an idea she simply could not stomach. She wasn’t going to let this golden opportunity slip away, and she wouldn’t let anyone get hurt. But if she was going to act, she had to do it now. She couldn’t afford to waste time and precious oxygen debating the matter.

  With a flicker of her lashes, she met Bronse’s eyes. She could see the paralyzing fear that laced their periwinkle depths, and with it she could see so much more. She could see everything he was feeling for her, right out in the open where JuJuren could see it too.

  “Let her go!”

  “Don’t let her go,” JuJuren countered hastily. “He cares about her. She’s probably one of his teammates. You want her back, Chapel? All you have to do is drop your guns. Otherwise I’ll tell him to rip her head off!”

  “Rave,” Bronse rasped, his hands around his weapon starting to shake as adrenaline coursed through his body.

  Ravenna knew what he wanted from her. It was the same thing she’d already been thinking.

  Her mind hit the interior of the elevator like a bomb striking at ground zero. The percussive force of the explosion sent both guards flying apart, one slamming into the left wall, the other to the right. At the same time, JuJuren was ripped off his feet. His body slammed into the floor as if he’d been tackled by a powerful, invisible player. Ravenna fell to the floor on her palms and knees, and she tried to breathe and focus on the men she held in place all at the same time. Then she got to her feet and walked out of the elevator until she was standing over JuJuren. The two guards were yanked out of the elevator with her, like kites tagging along on invisible strings that were somehow tethered to her body. They struggled against the unseen force that held them, but they couldn’t move so much as an eyelash with her holding on to them.

  “We have them, Rave. Let them down.” Bronse had his weapon trained on the guards as Rave saw Ender and Justice burst out of the stairwell at the end of the hall.

  “Stop,” Rave said.

  And they did. Everyone around her found themselves suddenly frozen in place. Mid-step, mid-run, mid-blink—every last action was seized in the power of her extraordinary mind. She walked up to Bronse, whose eyes were wide with the understanding that she had lashed him in place along with the criminals he was trying to apprehend. He didn’t understand it until she reached to take his weapon.

  “Ravenna, no!” he croaked out of his nearly paralyzed throat.

  But there was nothing he could do to stop her. It was child’s play for her to make him hand her the weapon, his fingers peeling back away from the grip and trigger just as easily as she would peel a piece of fruit. The gun was in her hand now as she walked up to JuJuren.

  The sweep of a finger lifted him from the ground and held him suspended in the air above her in a messiah position, the dangling helplessness of his body only accentuated by the shock and fearful understanding that washed over his face. She pointed the weapon at him. If she could have felt satisfaction right then, she would have smiled with it.

  “You’re a curse on my family as much as you were a blessing. If not for you, Bronse and I would never have met. Does that mean I have to be grateful to such a hateful creature?” She shook her head. “But wh
at I know is what Bronse refuses to see and understand. You are relentless. Whatever your reasons are for hunting him down, you are the kind of hunter who will never stop. Nothing will ever get in your way. That includes military prison.”

  “Rave, no!”

  “Ravenna, stop!”

  The shouts and demands of her teammates fell on deaf ears. All of her attention and focus was on JuJuren.

  “You think you have the right to make these choices. But you don’t. Evil people don’t have the right to destroy good people. I won’t let you destroy Bronse.”

  Rave reached out and held the muzzle of the weapon directly against the former admiral’s chest, right over his heart.

  “Are you saying you have the right to say if I live or die?” JuJuren demanded in a panic. “That makes you as bad as I am.”

  “No, it doesn’t. You see, normally I would care very much about deciding to take the life of another, but because you forced me to take control like this, I no longer give a damn. I could take your life and not feel a moment’s guilt. It will merely be a means to an end.”

  “Until the chemical in your brain fades away, Ravenna,” Bronse said in rapid gasps of breath, needing badly to get through to her before she did something she would always regret. Now he could very much see why she did not and could not use this telekinesis power of hers. The complete obliteration of her moral standards had been wickedly quick, almost violent. But when she awakened from the numbing effect on her emotions, it would be something quite different. His peaceful, gentle Ravenna would be crushed and devastated. She would be ashamed of what she had done and would think herself as evil as the man she now stood before. “When the chemical in your brain goes away, you will regret what you have done here today. You’ll be hurting yourself, the children, and everything you care about.”

  “But I’m not making this choice in anger,” she argued calmly. “The dispassion works both ways, Bronse. It makes my motives in doing this really quite pure. More a matter of cause and effect than anything else. He has caused damage and pain. The effect should be an action that puts an end to that.”