“Not yet. But it could be.” Zusane clutched the brandy glass in both shaking hands.
“Then you should go to identify the body,” he said. It was cruel, but he wanted to shake her out of her self-absorption. Just once, she needed to put her daughter first.
“Don’t be silly!” Zusane’s voice grew shrill and petulant. “I’m sending you, my best bodyguard. You’ll find her. You’ll save her. I mean, what else would she want? She always liked you better than she liked me, anyway.”
With that, Caleb tuned her out. Put one knife up his sleeve and one in his boot. Grabbed his LED flashlight and mini-GPS locator. Leaned down and kissed Zusane on the forehead, and said, “I’ll do what I can.”
He left Zusane rambling on, justifying her neglect to an audience of no one.
With the two-hour time change, it was eleven when he landed in Nashville to find some friend of Peter’s had a car waiting for him.
Caleb reached the campus in fifteen minutes. Vanderbilt University was steeped in night, quiet . . . tense. Something stalked at the edges of his consciousness.
He could hear fear on the prowl.
So he moved as he’d been trained, silently and always on the alert.
He went to Jacqueline’s dorm first, checked in with her roommate, and discovered Jacqueline had been dating Wyatt King, one of the premier frat boys from a respectable family in Buffalo, New York. Her roommate hadn’t seen Jacqueline all afternoon, hadn’t heard a word from her at all—and it was now eleven fifteen p.m. She said she wasn’t worried, but as she talked to him, she bit her fingernails down to the quick. The girl knew something, but he couldn’t shake the truth out of her. As far as she was concerned, she was covering for her friend.
So he went out hunting.
First, he checked at Wyatt’s frat house. The guys said they weren’t concerned, either . . . except they were.
One of them, Richie Haynes, followed Caleb out to the parking lot and told him that, with the downturn, Wyatt had lately had money problems, and he’d been acting strangely. Sort of exuberant, sort of ashamed, and considering how hot Jacqueline Vargha was, he hadn’t been bragging much. In fact, he’d kind of been pretending he wasn’t dating her.
When Caleb pinned Richie to the wall and threatened to choke him to death, the guy admitted Wyatt had tried to get him involved in a hinky plot to kidnap this girl with the weird eye tattoo in the palm of her hand, and sell her to white slavers. When Caleb choked him a little more, Richie recalled it hadn’t been white slavers, but some spooky guys who sounded like Satanists or something. After that, the dam burst and he babbled freely, telling Caleb that Wyatt had taken the chick into the country to a local sinkhole to deliver the girl and pick up his fee, and before Richie knew it, he was in Caleb’s car, giving directions to the sinkhole.
Caleb didn’t bother with stealth. It was far too late for that. With his brights on full blast, he drove up the pitted gravel road at seventy miles an hour, ignoring Richie’s warnings as he leaped potholes and left a choking cloud of dust behind him. The sinkhole opened right under his tires, and he slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways. Before Richie had even finished screaming, Caleb was out of the car with his pistol drawn. A quick survey with the flashlight located two cars parked off the edge of the road in the trees, and a path leading down into the sinkhole. Yelling for Jacqueline, Caleb ran down the path, sliding past rusting fenders and ruined sofas, through mounds of garbage left by people too cheap or lazy to take it to the dump.
She didn’t return his calls; she was unconscious or gagged or . . . or they’d already taken her somewhere else.
He refused to think he’d been too late.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of movement. He leaped up onto a battered dryer, grabbed a length of kudzu vine, and swung out over the sinkhole and around behind his attacker. The guy had some kind of power that could have knocked Caleb cold, but his focus was forward; all Caleb had to do was kick him between the shoulder blades and the guy went over the edge and into the abyss.
After that it was easy. The people Richie called the Satanists were some discombobulated branch of the Others, and once their muscle was out of the way, they ran like hell for the rim of the sinkhole. That left the sniveling Wyatt standing on a ledge, the earth crumbling around him. He held the unconscious Jacqueline as a shield, a kitchen knife at her throat, and in a trembling voice, he yelled, “Come close and I’ll kill her.”
The full moon was rising, slipping through the trees, groping toward the bottom of the sinkhole twenty feet below. The light gave the scene an unearthly cast, and Caleb saw Jacqueline, limp, drugged, gagged, and tied hand and foot.
He wanted to rip that little shit Wyatt from stem to stern.
He knew that the boy clearly saw him slip his pistol into the holster at his side and flex his hands. “Give her to me and I won’t kill you.”
Wyatt was a stupid, privileged kid who had never faced an adversary in his whole life. Caleb watched the parade of expressions across his face. He was frightened, defiant, angry, frightened again, and finally, like a spoiled little kid, determined to get his own way.
“Let me make myself clear.” Caleb spoke softly, but his fists clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened. “If you kill her, if you hurt her in any way, if she slips from your grasp and falls and needs a bandage on her skinned knee, I will spend the next three hours making you pray for mercy as your blood slowly drains into the dirt, and when I’m done, you’ll be alive. You’ll wish you weren’t . . . but you’ll have no way to scream in pain. No way to end your own life. No way to even wipe your skinny white ass.”
Wyatt may have gotten into Vanderbilt because his father was a paying alumnus, but he wasn’t a total moron. Keeping his gaze fixed on Caleb, he let Jacqueline’s limp form slowly slide to the ground.
And as soon as she was free of his grip, she came to life and kicked Wyatt’s feet out from underneath him.
He toppled over the edge and screamed all the way down.
Chapter 17
One week later
Caleb threw Jacqueline to the mat again.
She lay there, panting, exhausted, her white karate gi soaked in sweat.
“Get up,” he said. “You’re not done yet.”
He’d been training her for seven days, teaching her to fall, to kick, to break a man’s nose and rip off his testicles. She knew a thousand percent more than she’d known before, but still she didn’t know enough.
She staggered to her feet. “I’m tired.”
“Oh, please. You slept until eight this morning.” He glanced at the sun slanting into the gym at Zusane’s Connecticut home. “It’s barely three.”
“I’m hungry. I’m tired. I’m quitting.” Jacqueline stood with her hands on her hips, her elbows akimbo. “For once, just be satisfied with what I’ve done.”
He was never going to be satisfied. Not as long as the memory of Jacqueline’s bound, gagged body remained in his mind. He’d untied her, removed her gag, and carried her to the car while she lolled in his arms, passing in and out of consciousness. At the top, he’d called an ambulance and the cops. She’d gone to the hospital to have her stomach pumped of an almost lethal combination of alcohol and Valium. Wyatt had gone to jail for as long as it took his father’s team of lawyers to get him released.
But Caleb didn’t tell Jacqueline that. She was so mad—at herself for being a willing dupe, at Wyatt for being a slime bucket—that she focused on the fighting to the exclusion of all else.
Only now . . . she had a funny look on her face. He’d seen that look before, right before his mother started sobbing from sadness or loneliness or memories that weighed too much for her fragile shoulders to bear.
Yeah. Caleb was afraid Jacqueline might have other issues he was ill equipped to deal with, but for now, he knew what to do. Beat her down again and again. Break her. And lift her back into the confident girl she’d been when she had left for college.
Ign
oring the first rule he’d taught her, she turned away from him and headed toward the stairs.
He brought her down with a single quick kick to the backs of her knees.
She tumbled face-first onto the mat, and just lay there.
Hands up, he stood waiting for her attack.
She didn’t move. Just pressed her face to the floor.
And he realized she was crying.
“No.” This was not what he wanted. “No. Fighters don’t cry. Black belts don’t cry. You don’t cry.”
She didn’t answer. She remained there, shoulders shaking, making no noise at all. But she was definitely miserable, and somehow he had to deal with it.
Warily, still half convinced this was a trick, he knelt beside her.
She didn’t knock the shit out of him, so he guessed it wasn’t.
“Listen.” He placed his hand on her head. “You’re a good student. One of the best I’ve ever taught.”
A single loud sob wrenched out of her; it was pure, distilled agony. Then she pressed her arm to her mouth.
He slid his hand down to her back, and rubbed it in a slow circle. “Did he rape you? Is that why you’re crying?”
She flipped over so fast, he leaped back. “Is that what you think?” Her eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks wet, and she wiped her nose on her sleeve. “That’s all that could be wrong? That Wyatt raped me?”
She wasn’t going to distract him. “Did he?”
“No. He was afraid of me.” She started to sob again. “He thought—he said—I was a freak.”
“You are not a freak.” Caleb wiped his sweaty forehead on the sleeve of his gi.
“Really?” She shoved her palm into his face. “Then how do you explain this?”
Caleb stared at the birthmark on her palm. It looked like a tattoo, a stylized human eye in black ink. The mark was mesmerizing, and in Zusane’s world, it meant something very specific—it meant that Jacqueline was a seer of amazing power.
In Wyatt’s world, it meant she could be sold for a profit to the Others to be used as a sacrifice to the powers of darkness.
She wasn’t likely to forget that.
Taking her hand in his, he said, “There are ignorant people in this world—”
“Like Wyatt? Yeah, I got that. He’s ignorant. He’s a jackass. And he said he liked me. He said he wanted to date me. He said I was fun and cool and interesting. And I believed him. So if he’s an ignorant jackass, what does that make me?” She was red-faced and defiant, yelling at him.
He was a guy, ill equipped to deal with this kind of breakdown. So he offered to do what he’d been itching to do anyway. “Do you want me to take him out? Because I can.”
“No, I don’t want you to take him out. What I want is to have a normal life, where I date guys who don’t want to kill me, and study something dull like accounting, and get married and have normal children—and I’ll never get any of that, because Zusane says I have a fate.”
“I know.”
“I could deal with that. I really could. But here’s the question I’ve been wondering.” She thrust her face close to his. “How did you find out I was in danger?”
“Zusane knew. She sent me.”
“She sent you? She sent you? She knew I was going to be killed and she sent . . . you? Wow, how maternal of her.” Jacqueline’s eyes overflowed again, her voice wobbled, and her sobs interrupted every other word. “Did it . . . ever occur . . . to her . . . that I . . . might . . . want . . . my mother?”
“She wanted to come but—”
“But she was . . . on her honeymoon? Do you think I don’t . . . get that? Do you think this is the . . . first time she’s been too busy for . . . me? My God. My God. I’ve got nobody. Nobody. Nobody gives a damn about me. Nobody.” Jacqueline’s voice rose to a shriek.
He couldn’t stand it anymore. Tenderness overwhelmed his good sense, and he put his arms around her and whispered, “I care. I care too much.”
“You do not.” She pushed at him, furious at what she saw as condescending reassurance.
He pulled her closer. “This isn’t the time, and I don’t have the right, but I don’t lie.”
“Right. You care about me. Like a brother who watched me grow up. I suppose I should be grateful for that!”
His laughter wavered. “Not like a brother. Are you insane? I’ve never thought of you like that. Do you think I’m proud of this? I’m nine years older than you and you’re nothing but a”—she plunged her hand underneath the elastic at his waist—“child,” he finished, and his voice cracked with surprise.
She wrapped her fingers around his erection. Her startled gaze flew to meet his.
“I told you I don’t lie.” He waited for her to retreat, to run away from the evidence that he did want her.
But one thing he had learned during the days of fighting lessons—Jacqueline didn’t retreat. Instead she put her hand on his chest and shoved him to the mat—and the other hand, the one in his pants, squeezed him hard.
He stiffened, torn between glory and anguish. “If you’re trying to get revenge on men by using me, you’re going at it the right way.”
Her grip eased. Her expression was intent, captivated, as she explored him—the length, the breadth, his balls and his belly. Then she came back and gripped him again, and used her thumb to rub the head of his dick in smooth, slow motions.
By now, he could hardly speak, but he managed to ask, “Have you had much experience with this kind of thing?”
“No.”
“Because if you don’t stop that, I’m going to come in your hand.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Already?”
“There is no already. I’ve been trying to tell you—you’re the only woman I’ve ever really wanted.”
Jacqueline pulled her hand free.
Caleb should have been relieved that she had somehow regained her senses.
But she tugged at the black belt. “I may not have much hands-on experience. But that’s not my fault. Before I went out that night with Wyatt, I got myself on the pill, because I thought I was going to get lucky.” She put her face close to his. “I liked him because he looked like you.”
Caleb gazed into her amazing eyes, the color of pure amber, and realized he wasn’t the only one enthralled. “Do not compare me with that stinking little brat.”
“No, you’re not a brat. You’re mature and responsible. You never talk about your emotions. I have no idea what you think of me, if you have contempt for me for being so stupid as to get involved with a guy who wanted to sell me because of the mark on my hand.”
How could she be uncertain about his feelings for her? He felt as if he wore them on his sleeve. “You’re not stupid. You’re trusting and fresh and hopeful.” He smoothed her bangs off her forehead. “I’ve seen so much of the world, I haven’t been hopeful since I left Italy, yet when I’m with you . . . you make me young again.”
The anxiety in her eyes relaxed, and for the first time since he’d rescued her, she looked hopeful again. She looked like Jacqueline again.
Sitting up, she tugged at his belt again. “I’m still on the pill.”
Caleb opened his gi top in record time. “Then I guess we’re both going to get lucky.” Spreading his arms wide, he wordlessly invited her to explore his chest.
She put both her palms on his pecs and smoothed the contours, then worked her way down his ribs to his belly.
He’d been working hard. His blood still galloped in his veins. He was damp with sweat, yet when she leaned close and breathed him as if he were a perfume, he grabbed her arms.
No. You’ll scare her.
But it was too late. He flipped her beneath him.
She hit the mat.
He rolled on top of her, thrusting his knee between her legs.
They stared at each other, and he saw the same fire blazing in her that blazed in him. They kissed, openmouthed, tasting each other for the first time. He’d been waiting for this his whole adult life. T
here had been other women. Of course there had been. But always he’d stood apart, using them to learn his moves, to discover what pleasured them. In the secret depths of his mind, he’d imagined himself showing those moves to Jacqueline, overwhelming Jacqueline with his skill, bringing Jacqueline to orgasm—and all the while knowing his employer’s daughter was not for a peasant boy from Sicily.
Now . . . now he had Jacqueline in his hands, and he was too turned on to do anything but plunge his tongue repeatedly into her mouth. He taught her nothing except how desperately he wanted her.
That seemed exactly what she wanted to know. She reveled in the lesson, her tongue meeting every thrust, her body writhing against his. When she stroked his thigh with her bare foot, he caught her knee and pulled it around him, and slipped into the cradle between her legs. He moved against her, matching the rhythm of his tongue with the rhythm of his body.
Storm of Visions Page 13
