Lynn Michaels

by The Dreaming Pool

  She should’ve known Kroenke was the one. She should have known.

  You sound like Rachel, her little voice said.

  Oh, God help her, she did. Groaning, Eslin rolled onto her back and clutched the pillow to her chest. It felt as if it were stuffed with lead, but the weight of it wasn’t physical so much as psychical.

  The shadows had come back, were closing around her again, closing around them all. They were being watched, but not by Kroenke, never by Kroenke. If he’d been the watcher, Marco Byrne wouldn’t have handed him to them on a silver platter. Rolling off the bed, Eslin walked to the window and lifted the thin drape. Her room overlooked the pool, and there, just beyond the reach of her senses and the eerie glow cast by the lights illuminating the pool, the shadows flickered. Closing her eyes, Eslin drew a deep breath and reached out with her thoughts.

  Where are you, where are you… ?

  But nothing would come. There was only the pain in her head, the growing sense of dread she felt—and the fear.

  She was a good fifteen hundred miles closer to Marco Byrne than she had been in Santa Barbara, but she felt numb inside. Psychically blind, deaf, and dumb.

  Eslin had never had to think about her gift, had never had to reach for it. It had always been there, as involuntary and automatic as her physical senses, but it wasn’t there now.

  It’s absence terrified her, but she told herself she’d never had a concussion before, or a nonstop headache. If she could just get rid of the pain, everything would be all right again.

  She knew it would, hoped it would, prayed it would.

  Chapter 22

  But it didn’t. The pain only got worse.

  The cramped, light blue Volkswagen Bug, the only vehicle the car rental agency had available, was one reason. The second was the insomnia that hit Eslin when they stopped the next night in San Luis Potosí. The third reason was the tension mounting inside of her—the tension she felt in Gage, and in Ethan and Ramón—the tension that increased the closer they came to Mexico City.

  About four-thirty Sunday afternoon, with Ethan continually and nervously checking his watch, the Bug hit the outskirts of Mexico City after a long, slow swoop down from the highlands. As the highway widened out between hazy blue hills dotted with white apartment buildings that looked like pueblos as they climbed one on top of the other up the terraces furrowed into the hills, Gage glanced in the side mirror at Eslin.

  Her eyes dull, her face about two shades grayer than it had been that morning, she stared out the rearview mirror. She’d sat in that same position for the last two days. What was she looking for, Gage wondered, as he raised his hand to his neck chain, closed his thumb and index finger around the horseshoe nail, and watched a shiver ripple her slumped shoulders. Her spine stiffened, but a moment later relaxed as he let go of the nail and leaned his elbow on the door. The traffic that had so far been murderous turned suicidal. Taxis, buses, and cars nipped and tucked between lanes at speeds even Gage didn’t like thinking about.

  “I should’ve let you drive,” Ethan said. “You’d be in your element.”

  “Pull over and I will,” he volunteered.

  “No, thanks.” Ethan tightened his grip on the wheel. “I’d like to arrive at the Camino-whatever-the-hell-its-name-is in one piece. You could get the map out and make sure I don’t miss the turnoff.”

  His knees groaned in protest, but finally agreed to bend, and Gage opened the glove compartment. He took out the map, unfolded it, and Ramón leaned between the seats to help him with the Spanish names.

  Once more he looked at Eslin in the side mirror, saw that she’d leaned her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes. There were dark circles beneath them.

  “The map, Gage,” Ethan snapped irritably, “the map.”

  He glared at his brother, but lowered his eyes to the maze of blue and red lines spread across his lap. Navigating, even with Ramón’s assistance, consumed all his attention, and he didn’t look up again until Ethan had turned the VW off the Paseo de la Reforma and onto a quieter side street.

  At the next corner he turned left, and steered the Bug through an archway cut in a high whitewashed wall. After he parked the VW, he leaned back in his seat and looked at his watch.

  “Five twenty-seven,” he said, “half an hour under the wire.”

  “You are, if nothing else, always punctual,” Gage replied, as he opened the car door.

  Stretching out of the car was agony, and he groaned along with his muscles as he bent forward with his hands wrapped around his shins to unkink his lower back. When he straightened, Ramón and Ethan were unloading the last suitcase. He leaned back inside for his grip, and by the time he’d shut his door, Ethan had slammed the trunk and he and Ramón were following Eslin toward the glass-walled office.

  “What d’you bet,” he said, as he caught up with his brother, leaned ahead of him and opened the door, “that there’s another letter waiting from you know who.”

  “Give this man a cigar,” Ethan said sourly, and followed Ramón and Eslin inside.

  The clerk behind the desk greeted them in pleasantly accented English. While Ethan checked them in, Ramón wandered around the small office. Gage stood near Eslin, who’d sat down with her suitcase beside her on a wooden bench. He could feel her looking at him, not openly, but covertly with her head half-bowed.

  Ethan turned away from the desk then with a funny look on his face, keys in his right hand and a white business-size envelope in his left. He waved it at Gage.

  “Make that two cigars,” he said. “Shall we adjourn to my room and open it?”

  From the corner of his eye Gage saw Eslin raise her head and stare at him with suddenly brilliant eyes.

  “By all means,” he agreed, following his brother with Ramón and Eslin behind him, her violet eyes burning a hole between his shoulder blades.

  A short way down the corridor Ethan stopped and unlocked a white louvered door, pushed it open and ushered them inside, then shut the door and opened the envelope from Byrne.

  “ ‘Go to Chapultepec Park,’“ he read. “ ‘You will be met there.’ “

  “Jesus Christ!” Gage exploded. “How stupid does he think we are? That goddamn park is huge! Does he think we’re just going to stroll over there into God knows what?”

  “Do we have a choice?” Ethan asked, looking up from the letter.

  Gage stood staring at him, the fear trickling into his mind along with the memories. No, they didn’t have a choice—or did they?

  “We can get back in the car,” he said, “drive to the airport, and get the hell out of here.”

  “What?” Ethan, who never raised his voice, shouted. “After we’ve come this far—after we’ve paid that son of a bitch six million dollars—you want to get on a plane and go home? What about Ganymede?”

  For one angry moment Gage had forgotten about the stallion. Eslin knew it when he flinched at Ethan’s question. His aura was a whirling mass of confusion and turmoil, and her heart ached for him.

  “It might not be as risky as you think,” she put in quietly. “I talked to Doc on the phone last night. He called in the FBI as planned, and yesterday afternoon, two undercover agents got on a plane for Mexico City. We’ve got watchdogs of our own, Gage—Byrne isn’t holding all the cards.”

  Ethan shot Eslin a grateful look.

  Don’t you feel it, Gage wanted to shriek at her, don’t you know what will happen if we do this? She read the question in his eyes, in the tight corners of his mouth, and wanted to tell him, Yes, I know, but we have to go, we have to change the dream. The vision of heads bobbing like lilies on the water flashed in the back of her mind, but she pushed it away.

  “We’ll be safe enough as long as we all stay together,” she said with a confidence she really didn’t feel. “I know where to go.”

  It was the first thing she’d been certain about in two days, and despite her nervously pounding heart, she felt some measure of relief as she walked to the door
, opened it, and stepped out into the corridor. For a stunned half second no one moved, then the three of them jumped up to follow her.

  “We don’t need the car,” she said over her shoulder, “it isn’t far.”

  Following the side street, Eslin led them back to the Paseo de la Reforma. On the other side of the Paseo, behind open black iron gates set into a high concrete wall, lay Chapultepec Park. Tall, dusty-leaved trees rustled in the light late-afternoon breeze —just as they had in her dream.

  Flower vendors called to her, blew kisses, and threw long-stemmed roses and gladiolas at her feet. Eslin smiled at them, and picked up a couple of the flowers. Ramón collected a few more, but most of them lay behind her untouched as she turned through the gates into the park.

  “Let’s pair up,” she said. “Everybody’s responsible for their buddy.”

  The late afternoon was still bright and sunny, yet a shadow fell suddenly between Gage and Eslin. Oh, shit, he didn’t like this, he didn’t like this at all, but tried his best to put a damper on the icy clutch he felt in the pit of his stomach as he stepped forward and took her left elbow in his right hand.

  That left Ethan with Ramón, who trailed close behind them. Eslin led the way down the wide, paved walkway. This part of the park hadn’t been in her dream—the one she’d had Tuesday night, the one Kroenke had wakened her from—but she followed the walkway, weaving a path around short, plump women with braided hair, sometimes with an equally plump husband in tow, sometimes not, and a minimum of three children bobbing around their brightly dyed skirts.

  Above the playful shrieks of children, and the adult voices calling to them in the crowded park, Eslin could just barely hear the scraping noise she remembered from her dream. The trees were very thick, but the sound grew steadily louder. There was no gradual thinning of the dark trunks enclosing the path, they just simply stopped as she stepped off the pavement and threw her right arm over her eyes to shield them from the glare of sunlight on water.

  “Chapultepec Lake,” Gage murmured behind her.

  Benches ringed the footworn, earth shoreline. Multicolored rowboats, their oars scraping the sides, glided past on the glassy green water. This was it. The place she’d dreamed. She took her sunglasses out of her purse, put them on, and closed her fingers tightly around the flower stems in her left hand.

  “I dreamed about this place,” she said, remembering the dark figure she’d seen running down the path. “Byrne should be here shortly.”

  “I wish he’d hurry the hell up,” Ethan muttered irritably. “I want to get this over with.”

  Whatever this is, Gage thought, glancing over his shoulder at his brother, who was wandering up the slope kicking at loose stones in the dirt.

  Eslin felt a sharp prick, jerked her fist open, and watched a round red bead of blood well up on the inside of her left thumb. The disembodied heads flashed through her mind again as she shifted the flowers to her right hand, sucked the tip of her thumb, and felt her stomach recoil at the rusty taste of blood.

  “¡Hola! Hola, Señorita Heel-ah-ree! ¡Hola!”

  Eslin looked up and saw a handsome young Mexican man standing in the bow of a red rowboat about twenty yards offshore. He was grinning, waving his arms over his head, and wobbling back and forth as another young man worked the oars in opposite directions and roared with laughter. There was something vaguely familiar about him, and it occurred to Eslin, as the young man managed, just barely, to sit himself down without capsizing the little red boat, that he looked a lot like Marco Byrne.

  “Who the hell is that?” Gage asked as Ramón came up next to him.

  “I don’t know,” Eslin replied. “I’ve never seen him before. Have you?”

  “No, never,” Gage said, frowning. “How about you, Ethan?”

  His brother didn’t answer, and fear slammed into Gage like a fist. He spun around and nearly choked when he saw the empty slope behind him. The breeze stirred again, blowing dust across Ethan’s footprints and the two crooked drag marks disappearing into the stand of tall pines above them. Their feathered, low-hanging limbs were still moving.

  “Ethan!” Gage bellowed, charging up the hill and pushing his way into the trees.

  “Oh, no!” Eslin gasped, dropping her flowers and grabbing Ramón as she ran up the slope, around the pines, and onto the path.

  She reached it just as Gage came crashing through the other side of the trees, his face chalky, his chest heaving. There was no sign of Ethan, only knots of people milling along the walk.

  “Ethan! Eth-an!” Gage shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth as he ran down the path.

  “Ethan!” Ramón called, his olive face pale as he turned the other way.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Eslin clutched the back of his shirt, hauled him around, and ran after Gage. “We’re all staying together.”

  They’d all just been together, but she tried not to think about that, or the heel marks she’d seen in the dirt when she’d turned around a half second after Gage. Oh, God, oh, Ethan, where are you, she cried silently, as she towed Ramón behind her and did her best to keep pace with Gage’s long legs. Even though she suspected she knew what had happened to Ethan, she didn’t even try to tell Gage, she just let him run, shouting until his voice was hoarse and he had to stop to catch his breath.

  As he bent forward and leaned his hands against his knees, she let go of Ramón and laid her hand on Gage’s right arm. He straightened then, sweat dampening his hair, his breathing labored.

  “Maybe he went the other way.” He panted, shrugging her hand away as he wheeled around the way they’d come.

  “He didn’t go anywhere, not of his own volition.” She kept her voice gentle but clamped her hand around his elbow and refused to let go. “We’d better go back to the lake now—Byrne’s waiting for us.”

  Chapter 23

  He was sitting on a bench near the spot where Ethan had disappeared. He was a small man, about five nine if Eslin remembered right, delicately built and breathtakingly handsome. His features were flawless, his glossy black hair longer than it had been in the photograph with Ganymede, but his eyes were the same. Gleaming and ebony hard.

  They’d haunted Eslin’s dreams but smiled at her now as he leaned his right elbow on the back of the bench and looked up at her as she stopped in front of him with Gage on one side of her and Ramón on the other. He was wearing expensive-looking woven sandals, celery-colored chinos, and a Hawaiian print shirt. Not at all gaudy, but beautifully patterned with coconut palms in the violent hues of red and blue that Eslin had seen in her nightmare. A pair of black-framed sunglasses lay folded in the shirt’s breast pocket.

  “Where the hell is my brother?” Gage demanded angrily.

  “For the moment he is safe,” Byrne replied, his eyes no longer smiling as they settled on Gage. “And if you wish him to remain so, I suggest you modify your tone of voice.”

  “You son of a bitch—”

  “Don’t, Gage.” Eslin caught his left wrist in her right hand and stayed the move he made toward the bench. The muscles in his arm were trembling, his aura pulsating a vicious, violent red.

  “What do you want now?” he asked, his voice calmer, but just barely. “You’ve already got Ganymede and six million dollars of our money.”

  “And I also have Ethan.” Marco smiled.

  He was enjoying this. Relish and malice rolled off him in almost visible waves that made Eslin’s head pound sickeningly.

  “I don’t know that for sure,” Gage replied, his voice sounding almost normal. “And you’ll pardon me if I don’t believe a goddamn word you say.”

  With a sigh and a slight shake of his head, Byrne slipped his left hand into his shirt pocket and withdrew a gold Cross pen. He held it out to Eslin, who plucked it quickly from his fingers, turned the clip toward her, and read the name Ethan Roundtree engraved there.

  “You may keep that as proof,” Byrne said.

  “How much do you want this time?” Gage asked.<
br />
  “I don’t want money,” Marco answered smoothly. “I want to see if Miss Hillary is as good a clairvoyant as I am told.” He glanced at Eslin and smiled. “I hope you feel up to a game of hide-and-seek.”

  Eslin closed her eyes as the pain in her temples swelled and the nightmare of the disembodied heads thundered through her mind. Let me wake up, oh, please let me wake up.

  “You bastard,” Gage breathed.

  Sensing rather than seeing the lunge he took at Byrne, Eslin launched herself between them, her eyes flying open a half second before a metallic click spun her around in front of Gage. The young Mexican man who’d been in the boat stepped out of the pine trees, a knife in his right hand. The blade flashed in the sun, the reflection stabbing at her eyes; then the triggering mechanism clicked again and the knife disappeared.

  “My cousin,” Byrne said, “would not hesitate to slit your throat. And with crime what it is these days…” He left his sentence unfinished, shrugged, and glanced at Ramón. “You look pale, compañero. You are not enjoying your trip?”

  “Don’t call me that,” the boy replied shakily. “I’m not your friend. I never was.”

  “So you say now.” Byrne shrugged again. “But I remember a very unhappy boy who would come to me and complain bitterly about the Roundtrees because they would not let him ride their horses. You don’t remember that boy?”

  “I remember him.” Ramón’s whole body trembled visibly.

  “Ah, good. It’s important that you remember.” Byrne rose off the bench, nodded at the pine trees, and two more young men wearing Hawaiian shirts stepped out of the frothy branches. “I give you forty-eight hours to find Ethan, Miss Hillary, and I will tell you this much—both he and Ganymede will be in the same place.” He unfolded his sunglasses and slipped them over his nose. “Of course, if you do not find them by midnight Tuesday, you will never see either one of them again.”