Storm of Visions

by Christina Dodd

  She tried to get her feet under her, to lift herself onto him.

  He controlled her with his hands and elbows, and all the while, he watched her with a heated gaze that taunted her for wanting what he now offered.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please. Caleb, I need . . . please.”

  “What do you need?” He eased closer. “This?”

  “More.”

  “Honey, how much more can you take?” He slid closer. “This?”

  His organ pressed so deep inside, he touched her womb. It stretched her, made her gasp and clutch handfuls of the sheet. It made her crave . . . “More. Faster. Caleb, for the love of God . . .” She was close, so close. . . .

  “Ah. You want this.” He pulled out almost all the way. He braced himself, and she waited, trembling. Then, hard and fast and without pity, he thrust in.

  She screamed as the long-awaited climax hit her in a wave, tumbling her over and over, taking her thoughts, her words, her mind.

  She could hear him laughing as he thrust again, his mastery complete.

  But his grip on her thighs slipped, and instinctively she wrapped her legs around his hips and met that thrust.

  Suddenly, he wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t moving. His eyes closed and his face grew taut.

  She called the shots now. She tightened her muscles, stroking him on the inside, making him feel her on his every inch. She lifted herself to him, grinding herself against his pelvis.

  When he opened his eyes, the Caleb she knew was gone. In his place was the savage she’d demanded. He let her hands go and, lifting her buttocks in his palms, he propelled himself into her with a rhythm and a power she had only imagined.

  She dragged him down to her, exulting in the flex of his muscles beneath her fingers.

  He was unrelenting.

  She was formidable.

  Between them, they were invincible.

  Her climax built, growing with each movement, each groan, with the pure knowledge that she had driven him as mad as he had driven her.

  A flush suffused his forehead and lust toughened his face. Remorselessly, he began to come, thrusting harder, faster.

  Her whole body clenched around him. In a frenzy of hunger, she clawed at him, wordlessly commanding he give her everything within him.

  And he did, pressing his whole body against her, into her, making her know his possession.

  They hung, suspended on a precipice of ecstasy.

  Then gradually, the frenzy that had gripped them rolled on.

  He collapsed onto her.

  She tasted his shoulder and savored his salty skin. She smelled desire rolling off him, and knew he was hers.

  Whatever worries she had had before they started, they were gone now. She was absolutely boneless with depleted passion.

  Turning his head toward hers, he looked at her through narrowly slitted eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m magnificent.”

  “Yes. You are.” Groaning, he eased himself away from her. He sat, his chest heaving with each breath, and scrutinized her as if he wanted to memorize each inch of skin. “Jacqueline.”

  “Yes.” Would he want to do it again?

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “What?” She clutched at his arm. Now? He wanted to leave? Was he crazy? “Go where?”

  “Back to Irving’s.” He kissed her hand, put it on her stomach, and climbed off the bed.

  “To hell with Irving!”

  Caleb paid no attention. “I want you to stay here. Take a nap. Read a book. Check on my mother, if you feel the urge. I gave her her medication, and she’ll sleep for several hours, but even if she feels rocky, she’ll get up and try to make a pie or something to prove she can.”

  “I’ll check on her. I don’t mind. You know that.” She sat up and pushed the hair off her forehead. “But why do you have to go back?” It had better be an incredibly good reason.

  “Because someone tried to kill you, and I’m going to look into it.”

  Chapter 31

  I ’m going to look into it. The phrase echoed in Jacqueline’s mind. I’m going to look into it.

  She’d heard that phrase somewhere before.

  If he looks into it, he will die. If he looks into it, he will die.

  The words gained meaning, gained strength, grew larger and louder, like a snowball rolling downhill.

  If he looks into it, he will die. If he looks into it, he will die.

  “You can’t!” She scrambled into a sitting position, resting on her heels among the pillows. “If you look into it, you’ll die.”

  He straightened, his clothes in his hands, and stared at her. “If I look into . . . What are you talking about?”

  “Yesterday. After the vision. And today. At the meeting.” Her hands shook as she recalled, “I heard a voice in my head repeating over and over, If he looks into it, he will die. If he looks into it, he will die. I thought . . . The crystal ball was there, and I thought it was a warning not to let anyone look into the globe. But that’s not it. It’s you. You’re not supposed to look into this crime!”

  “You heard a voice in your head?” He disappeared into the bathroom. She heard water running, and when he came back, his face had been washed, and his hair was damp and combed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We were busy. I was hurt. You were gone. There were a lot of things going on.” She could see he wasn’t buying it. He was still moving around the room, getting ready. “Because that’s crazy. I have a vision and then I hear a voice in my head. That’s not normal. Mother never heard voices.”

  “How would you know? You never talked to her about her visions.” Maybe he didn’t mean for her to hear it, but his voice held a hint of reproach.

  And it hurt. “Then maybe I should ask you. Did Mother ever hear voices?”

  “I don’t think so.” He rummaged in his closet, pulled out a pair of clean jeans and pulled them on, and donned a crisp, white dress shirt. “Whose voice did it sound like?”

  “I don’t know. It was just your standard disembodied voice.” She was sarcastic.

  He was serious. “Was it a woman’s voice?”

  “I don’t . . . think so.” She tried to put a gender on it, and shook her head. “I don’t know. It was simply this . . . voice of doom.” Remembering his report to Irving about the woman who spoke to him from afar, she followed his reasoning. “You think this is someone talking in my brain.”

  “Yes. Making mischief, scaring you to death.” Sitting in a chair, he pulled on ankle-high leather boots. “Who was close by when it happened?”

  “Everyone. Pretty much . . . everyone.” Remembering, she shook her head. “Well, no. Today, Samuel wasn’t there. But we don’t know whether proximity matters, do we? Whoever it is—if it is someone—might be able to project clear across the universe.”

  “That’s true. And whether someone’s speaking in your brain, or the words are a prediction of the future, doesn’t matter, either.” Caleb stood and adjusted his belt. “I’ve still got to go back to Irving’s and figure out the identity of our bad seed before something awful happens.”

  “What could be worse than you losing your life?” she asked urgently.

  “A lot of things. Whoever it is could scare the Chosen so much, everyone runs screaming into the streets for the Others to pick off at their leisure. Or he could blow up Irving’s house. Or he could come for you again.” He put a knee on the bed and adjusted the covers across her lap, touched her lips with his thumb, then used it to circle her nipple.

  Putting her hand over his, she pressed it to her breast. She wasn’t proud of the tactic, but she wasn’t above using sex to keep him with her. “You can’t. Don’t you see? Maybe it is your woman with the scarred nose talking in my head, trying to make me crazy. But what if it’s a hangover from my vision? What if I know what’s going to happen to you because I’m a psychic? You’ve been bugging me all these years to become the seer I was born to be. Could you at least respect
my gift as much as you respected my mother’s?”

  “I do respect your gift. How could I not?” He drew his hand away. Reluctantly, but he did. “I saw what you can do—and what the vision can do to you. What you have is more powerful than Zusane ever knew, and if you never use it again, it will be fine with me.”

  She looked at her bandaged hand, and muttered, “But I might have to.”

  “Exactly. You have a job to do. As I have a job to do.”

  He frustrated her so much, she wanted to scream. “You were always asking Zusane’s advice, giving her lip service about her marvelous talent. If she told you to stay, you would have stayed!”

  “I showed her respect, yes.” His voice was level; his eyes grew cold. “And paid lip service. Because she needed it.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “No. You don’t need false flattery. You’re fine.”

  “My mother was fine, too.”

  “No. She wasn’t. Zusane was broken.”

  “Broken? What do you mean, broken? She was glamorous. She was desired. She was completely, horribly sure of herself.” Unlike Jacqueline, who spent her gawky adolescence being compared to Zusane, and not favorably.

  “She was one of the Abandoned Ones.” When Jacqueline would have pointed out the obvious, he held up one finger. “Not like you. Nobody rescued Zusane from the Dumpster. She had to rescue herself.” He strapped a leather holster across his chest, then extracted a pistol from the drawer, loaded it, and slipped it into place. “She grew up in Eastern Europe, in Ruyshvania—”

  “No, she didn’t!”

  “During the worst of the Communist years. People there were afraid—the old superstitions hold them tight—and the family, or the village, or whoever, tossed her as an infant in a ditch in the middle of winter. Maybe because they were starving and couldn’t support another baby. Maybe because she was marked with an eye on the back of her shoulder. She grew up in an orphanage, and they abused her for the mark, and when the woman who ran the orphanage realized Zusane had visions, she sold her.”

  “Did she tell you all this?” Jacqueline swallowed to subdue her nausea. “Because it isn’t what she told me. She said she was the daughter of a dispossessed Hungarian noble.”

  “She never lived in Hungary.” He pulled a series of knives from the center drawer of his dresser and lined them up on the flat surface.

  What he said horrified her. What he was doing horrified her. “I don’t believe you.” The idea of Zusane, pampered and cherished by her Hungarian nursemaid, by her servants and her father, was too firmly implanted in Jacqueline’s mind to be easily expelled.

  “She lived in Ruyshvania,” Caleb repeated. “The dictator Czajkowski bought her, and he possessed her in every way. He dressed her in beautiful clothes, he trained her in elegant manners and he kept her by his side—and when she didn’t have visions on his command, he beat her until she lost the child she had conceived.”

  Jacqueline flinched at the ugly pictures in her mind.

  “Why do you think she never had children of her own?”

  Because she didn’t want to ruin her figure. That was what Jacqueline had always thought.

  “She almost died, and she never was able to conceive again.”

  Jacqueline didn’t believe him. She couldn’t believe him. “Hungary . . .”

  “At the age of seventeen, she met one of Czajkowski’s guests, a wealthy, powerful man. She put herself into his bed, she used her arts to convince him to take her to the US, and when he begged, she married him.”

  “For the money.”

  “Of course for the money.” Caleb understood if she didn’t. “She needed the money to create the persona of Zusane. Glamorous Zusane, elegant Zusane, wealthy Zusane. Never again—poor, abused Zusane.”

  No. No. “How do you know this?”

  He placed a four-inch throwing knife into his boot. He slipped on a sports jacket, checked to make sure no bulge betrayed the pistol and holster. “I wanted to know the truth, so I followed the trail back to Ruyshvania.”

  Caleb painted a different Zusane in her mind. Self-indulgent, yes. Spoiled, yes. Shallow ... yes, but because she couldn’t bear to plumb the depths of her pain.

  “You said she adopted you because she wanted a clone. In its way, it’s true. She rescued you because she saw herself and she couldn’t bear to know another child would suffer as she had suffered.” Caleb was ruthless as he recited his facts. “She wasn’t a good mother. Motherhood is suffering for your child, and she never wanted to suffer again. But she loved you.”

  “I know.” Jacqueline did know. She had always known.

  He should have stopped talking. But apparently, he’d been waiting to say this for a long, long time. “You were constantly angry because your mother didn’t act like a mother; she acted like a diva. By making me your bodyguard, she acted in your best interests—because she was your mother.”

  He was stubborn. So stubborn. Despite Jacqueline’s wishes, despite the danger, he was leaving her. Leaving her after he’d asked her to marry him, after she’d admitted she loved him. He didn’t love her, or he wouldn’t go. “Okay,” she said. “But are you sure she didn’t act in the best interests of the Gypsy Travel Agency? Because of the mark on my hand?”

  He was dressed. He was ready to go. And he put his hands on his hips with an impatience so manifest, he made her pull the covers up to hide her body. “Are you ever going to grow up?”

  He had showed her a view of herself she didn’t like, and despite her pleas, he had prepared for a battle from which he might never return. In a rage of shame and fear, she lashed out. “Maybe you are too old for me.”

  “Maybe I am.” He slipped a second throwing knife up his sleeve. “But I’m still going to find the son of a bitch who tried to kill you and take care of him.”

  In as nasty a tone as she could dredge up, she said, “Because my mother told you to.”

  Leaning over her, he pinched her chin. “Because your mother told me to.”

  She jerked her head away and watched him walk out of the room. She waited, wanting him to return so she could take it back, so she could explain she didn’t mean it.

  Then the outer door slammed behind him—and she was alone.

  He was gone. To his death? She didn’t need a vision, or words in her head, to understand the possible consequences of their acrimonious parting. She might never see him again.

  He was gone . . . as her mother was gone.

  The memory of yesterday’s catastrophe rolled over her again. The smoke, the fear, the screams . . . her mother’s calm face and her hand shoving Jacqueline out of the plane and into nothingness. The mere memory made Jacqueline’s heart pound and her lungs hurt, and finally, the grief that had haunted her like a ghost within her consciousness slammed into her with the force of a hurricane.

  Her keen of sorrow was deep, wrenching, painful. She crumpled onto the bed, pressed her face into the pillow to muffle her sounds of anguish. She cried for Caleb. She cried for her dreams that had so briefly gleamed like gold and now crumbled into dust.

  But mostly she cried for her mother.

  She cried because Zusane was gone, and Jacqueline would never again see her come in, dripping with diamonds, glittering with sequins, all beauty and glamour. She’d never hear that rich, accented voice nagging her about finishing school and accepting her destiny. She would never have the chance to tell her how much she loved her laughter, the way she always saw the humor in herself. She couldn’t explain how much she admired Zusane’s generosity, giving away money and jewels with abandon to anyone in need.

  As wave after wave of misery swept over Jacqueline, she pulled her knees to her chest and curled into the fetal position. She rocked back and forth, seeking relief from the sobs that ripped at her throat, from the pain that tore at her heart, but nothing could help her now.

  When she was a child, she had adored Zusane’s glamour, missed her when she was gone, loved those special moments when Zusane
told her about her visions and assured her that someday, she’d have visions, too.

  Then she became a gawky adolescent, too tall and too blond, and Zusane became an embarrassment. Worse, in her secret heart of hearts, Jacqueline hated the comparisons between them. She had known she could never be as sensational, as enchanting, as exotic as Zusane.

  Jacqueline had been jealous.

  So she told Zusane she was a lousy mother. She told Zusane she disapproved of her husband-hunting and her mad partying. She told her she was superficial and silly.