Sharing the Darkness

by Marilyn Tracy

  Blocking the road, rigged to face each other nose-to-nose, were two black station wagons, unmarked, obviously intending serious business. Why hadn’t she seen this, heard the thoughts of the men inside? And where was the white the dream had warned her about?

  Where was Teo? Immediately, the memory from the dream—Teo with blood spilling down his front, calling her name, his hands outstretched, blood upon them—sprang her mind into galvanized action, and her block dropped open and her thoughts spilled free, like floodwater escaping a broken dam.

  Teo, she cried out frantically. And then, stronger, TEO.

  Was it too late? They were blocking her, were they already at Teo’s mountain home? Was he safe? Had she left too late?

  Too late…too late…the words seemed to reverberate in her head, echo in her heart.

  Teo! Hear me, Teo! Desperation, need and love all combined to spike her thoughts with adrenaline, sending them careening wildly, questingly. Needfully.

  The two black cars were totally blocking both lanes of traffic on this narrow road. From some dim recess of her still rational mind, Melanie knew she had a slim margin for escape and she used every bit of lore she’d ever read or seen on car escapes to pull off a miracle.

  She forced herself to let up on the brakes, then, in what seemed sheer lunacy, jammed her foot down on the gas pedal with all her might. With the smooth action known to Buicks, the car leapt forward, and without so much as a whine, whizzed toward the parked cars. Hoping she’d gathered enough speed, she urgently pulled up on the emergency brake and cranked the wheel sharply to the left.

  Please…please…please, she thought as she heard the scream of the tires on the road, felt the sickening conflicting message shudder through the car. For a single blessed moment she actually felt the rear end of the car slowly sliding on its squealing tires, almost as though in slow motion, and knew that stunt seen so often in movies—the mythic J-turn—was a reality, that it was truly working for her now.

  All the while—a matter of some five seconds or less—she mentally yelled at Chris to depress the lock button. They wouldn’t be able to get in for a few minutes at any rate. Just let her have enough time to turn the car around and head back toward Loco Suerte. Toward Teo.

  Teo!

  Car stop! Chris suddenly screamed in her mind.

  The force of his mental command, his warning, made her wince, lose control of the wheel for a moment. “Chris…” she started to protest, then trailed off as the car, in midswing, abruptly died. It didn’t stop its wide swing immediately, however, it continued to glide as though on ice, until it gently rocked to a halt.

  And now she and Chris were also straddled across the road. From her side window she had a direct view of the station wagons blocking the way, the two men inside each of them.

  She gave a rough sob, a choked sound that was somewhere between a scream and a whimper, and urgently tried cranking the key downward. Nothing happened. There was no engine-about-to-turn-over sound, no click-click-click of a starter on the fritz. Nothing. No sound at all except her ragged, sobbing breathing and, oddly, Chris’s clapping.

  And then she understood. This was no malfunction of the rental Buick. This was nothing she had done, either. The clapping hands said it all.

  Chris had stopped the car. With his mental command.

  Dear Lord, Chris had stopped their only means of escape!

  “Oh, honey!” she cried. “Don’t stop the car now! Those are the bad men—” Bad men! Bad men! “—We need the car to get away.”

  “Make loud noise now, Mommy?”

  The men stepped out of their cars. There was something incredibly strange and ominous about them. And not just because they were after her son. As if seeing them through a camera lens, Melanie watched them round the cars, standing a little to the sides of each one, hands extended, palms exposed, as though trying to tell her that there was absolutely nothing up their sleeves.

  Fear, paralyzing, crippling fear, glued her to the seat, made her heart nearly stop, her breath catch in her lungs.

  TEO! TEO! she projected, unconsciously. She had no sense of him nearby, no sense of him at all, but she sent the thought lurching outward, racing back to Loco Suerte, back to the mountain aerie, back to where she should never have left mostly, back to the man she should never have abandoned.

  Even as her mind sought him, desperately, achingly, she watched as all four men began walking toward their Chris-stalled car. She frowned as she realized why they looked so ominous, so odd. All four of the men wore strange-looking, slightly ridiculous helmets, as if they were three-piece-suit bikers.

  Even knowing she was in the gravest of dangers, she felt a bubble of hysterical laughter trying to break free. She covered her mouth to hold it in, but a small sound—a ragged, tattered thread of noise—escaped anyway.

  But it didn’t sound like a laugh. It sounded suspiciously like a sob.

  As if still seeing them lens-small, Melanie felt she wasn’t watching real men at all, but movie characters, actors, people pretending to be thugs, hit men. Perhaps even men trying to behave like creatures from outer space. She wished it were true, but knew it wasn’t.

  These men were walking toward her car to take her son from her with force.

  And as she frozenly stared out the side window at them, watching their slow, very cautious approach to her car, she suddenly understood why they were wearing helmets, what the helmets portended.

  The helmets were lead-lined, might, in fact, be lead clear through. And she couldn’t read a thought from a single one of them. They were like the gloves the scientists had used when handling Chris, and the same had probably been used when touching Teo all those years ago.

  They were wearing the helmets to block their thoughts from the very people they sought to capture. They had escaped detection this way. They knew she was telepathic, didn’t perhaps know the extent of her abilities, but they knew enough, nonetheless. She had spilled it all during the early days of the wining-and-dining that the PRI had done for her, in the days when filling out forms and taking tests had seemed perfectly normal, even adventurous.

  And they knew Chris was one of the strongest telepaths ever recorded.

  But though her mind had been blocked all this time, Chris’s had been open. They could have taken them at any time. Why this elaborate dodge? Had they conned Pablo into helping them again?

  Then she felt a wave of nausea sweep over her as she understood the full import of what she was seeing. Her own block from Teo had helped them, while the helmets had protected them from Chris or Teo’s discovering their presence.

  And even after she’d lowered her precious guard, she hadn’t felt their thoughts, only the danger. She hadn’t known they hid around the curve in the road.

  But Chris had. He had known. Despite the helmets, despite their caution, he had known. Car stop. He’d most definitely known.

  “Can you still read their thoughts, Chris?” she asked suddenly, hopefully.

  He didn’t so much as glance her way. His eyes were fixed on the men slowly narrowing the some hundred yards separating them.

  “Make loud noise now, Mommy?” Chris asked again, louder.

  He was only three. Just a baby. He didn’t understand what they wanted from him, what they would do to him. And they were breaching the distance. They would have what they wanted within moments.

  “Fine. Yes,” she said, defeat pulsing through her veins. “Make any noise you like, Chris.” Make the loud noise, make your toys dance, bend a rainbow upside down and fill it full of green ice cream. It’s all the same to me. Do whatever your little heart desires…because it’s very likely, it’ll be the last thing you ever do on your own.

  “Make a very, very loud noise, honey. A huge, humongous noise.”

  The air in the car seemed to shimmer again, as if they were sitting in the center of some kind of force field. She had the sensation of air being drawn out of the car as if transforming it into a vacuum. And she could see the f
our men looking around in some confusion, as if Mother Nature was suddenly changing the rules on them.

  My God, she thought, what had Teo taught him? She’d seen the little tricks, the careful lifting of the coffeepot, the pouring of the coffee without spilling a drop, the opening of a cabinet, the slow, deliberate closure. But she’d witnessed nothing like this. Nothing.

  The shimmer she’d seen in the car stretched outside now, enveloping the space between their stalled car and the two cars blocking the road. It gathered strength, form, size, twisting, writhing, a wall of translucent, rippling sparkle.

  “Chris…?” she started to ask, then trailed off as the four men some twenty yards from their barricaded cars began backing away from the imposing, impossible shimmer.

  “Rocks,” Chris said distinctly, and Melanie had the briefest of mental images of his rocks on the cloud bank in the space between her car and those of the PRI henchmen. Suddenly, that space was filled with a blinding ball of fire, accompanied by the loudest clap of thunder she’d ever heard in her life.

  Kerr-R-R-RACKKK!

  Melanie lifted a hand to the side of her head, gave a brief shriek, and instinctively reached for her son with her free hand.

  He wasn’t the slightest bit frightened. Instead he was again clapping his hands in self-congratulation. “Make loud noise, Mommy. Chris make loud, big noise!”

  “The biggest,” she agreed, pulling him to her chest, hugging him tightly.

  Melanie.

  She whirled in surprise, feeling Teo so close in her mind that she’d felt sure he could touch her, as well. But he wasn’t there.

  What was there was one of the four men in the helmets. But this one didn’t have his palm facing forward, nothing-up-my-sleeve style. This one had a very nasty-looking gun with an incredibly dark barrel pointed directly at her forehead.

  “Game time’s over,” he called through the window. “All we want is the kid, ma’am. Just get out of the car. Real, real slow.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As they rounded yet another curve in the long, winding road leading the back way to Tierra Amarillo, Teo felt Melanie and Chris. He could almost see them. They were still inside the car, but in extreme danger.

  “You find them yet?” Pablo asked, but Teo didn’t answer.

  I’m with you, Melanie, he projected.

  He felt Chris first, a joyous, triumphant touch. Made loud, LOUD noise. Teo! Come home now?

  Teo wanted to yell at him to be careful, wanted him to understand the gravity of the danger he and his mother were in. For, through the boy’s vision, he could see a man in some kind of strange helmet standing at the window of their car, a large, dark weapon trained on Melanie’s forehead. But he didn’t want to frighten Chris. Not now.

  And almost making his heart stop was the nearly casual reference Chris had made to home…Teo’s home.

  Can you make another noise, niño? Teo asked.

  Juice all gone, Chris projected a little sadly.

  Teo knew this was very likely so. Chris was only an infant in the world of telekinesis. Making a lightning bolt took a tremendous amount of energy at first. A fireball took even more. Almost the same amount as a full-scale healing did. It would be several minutes before Chris’s “juice” was back up again.

  Melanie…? Teo projected. And suddenly he was there. With her, in her mind, where he’d always longed to be. He could feel her terror, her frozen fear. And he felt her embrace, her knowledge that he was with her. Her block was still somewhat there, wasn’t totally eradicated, but it had been lowered enough for him to break through, to hold her to his thoughts, to wrap his mind around hers.

  Tears came to his eyes as she returned the embrace, and he stretched to meet the familiar-unfamiliar patterns that comprised her mind.

  He felt a jolt of terror rock her, and knew with sudden horror that the terror she was feeling was not for herself, not even for Chris, but for him. Her mind started to close, to thrust him out again, block him from knowing the dangers she and Chris faced…still trying to protect him from the PRI’s intent.

  Don’t shut me out! he demanded furiously, desperately. If she closed to him now, all he would have to rely on would be Chris’s less than accurate projections. Without her, he wouldn’t be able to reach them in time, wouldn’t be able to help.

  They can’t hurt me! he projected strongly. He felt her reel with the impact of the fierce thought, felt her shock, her negation ripple like an after-wave back at him.

  He rapid-fired images at her, images from his days at the PRI, his time alone, his destruction of the PRI wing, the reasons for his absolute seclusion. The PRI could not stop him. There was nothing they, or their kind, could ever do to him. Nothing.

  Slowly, hesitantly, the guard around her mind slipped, quivered, yet held.

  Teo suddenly remembered one of the projections Chris had sent him when he’d asked about Melanie’s closed mind. Rapunzel’s castle. Instinctively he projected the image at her, then frantically called to her, making certain she saw the rope ladder he’d added to the picture, the ladder dangling from the window high, high above.

  I’m coming, he sent.

  And felt her accept, and finally acknowledge.

  And once up that ladder, mentally embracing her, taking her into his arms, he projected his proximity, his determination to help them. And his love of her, the nights they’d shared, the understanding he now had of himself, of her. Of what she’d done for him, for his sake.

  He felt her acceptance of the images he sent, marveled at her honey-rich tone, her brandied flavor. And despite the danger, almost as though negating it, she returned the subtleties of their time together, the mystery, the intrigue and the incredible fascination she had for him. That she would always have for him.

  Better hurry, she sent, her mental voice tinged with irony, dusted with longing and hunger. He couldn’t help but smile.

  “I found them,” he told Pablo. “Step on it.”

  “Why don’t you fly us there?” Pablo asked in all seriousness.

  “This is no time for games,” Teo snapped.

  “Señor El Rayo…if there was ever a time for games, this is it.”

  Teo thought of Chris’s innocent joy in making the “LOUD” noise and Melanie’s sacrifice for his sake.

  He had been so long without connection with another that he was almost surprised when Melanie and Chris both stretched their thoughts across his, hearing Pablo through him, and now augmenting Pablo’s statement, expressing their approval. Their urgency.

  For Teo, it was like hearing a family at dinner, all talking at once, smells from the stove mingling with laughter, with approbation, a nearly cacophonous harmony. But this was no innocent evening at home; this was danger of the worst kind. The life and death kind.

  Help you came Chris’s loud yell.

  Stay away came Melanie’s deeper, softer voice.

  But Teo hesitated. If he lifted Pablo’s old Chevy and made it fly through the air, even rearranged the mountains, scaring the pants off the PRI men in their ridiculous helmets, they would still believe they only had Teo to fear, not Chris, not his mother.

  They had to know that in dealing with Melanie and Chris, they had more than they’d bargained for. They had to know they had another Teo Sandoval on their hands. And they, and all the perverted minds like them, had to know, once and for all, that the piper had to be paid sometime. And he wanted them to know that today was that time.

  He took a deep breath and projected what he wanted Chris to do, what he needed Melanie to do. And then he promised them he would be there.

  I promise you, he told Melanie as he felt her withdrawing to obey his strange commands. I’ll be there for you.

  Melanie knew Teo was right, knew that the only way the people from the PRI and people like them were ever going to leave Chris alone was for Chris to clearly demonstrate that he would never be trainable, usable. That he was already too far advanced for them to ever attempt to bend him to their pe
rverted ways of thinking.

  But the notion of fighting them, relying on Teo to help them do so, was utterly, completely terrifying. It would require a totally open mind with Teo, a complete lowering of all mental and physical guards. She would literally become one with him, in body and spirit, for his thoughts would be directing her actions.

  And, too, she could clearly see the reality of what she’d projected to Teo. The gun trained on her was less than three inches from her head, not miles away, a shadowy image in someone else’s mind. And she could see the grim face of the man holding it, the narrowness of his eyes, the gritted teeth.

  “Come on, lady! Unlock the door. We don’t want any trouble.”

  Ready, Chris? she projected. Her heart was pounding so uncomfortably, she was halfway certain she would die of a cardiac before the battle even began.

  Please hurry, she sent to Teo, perhaps to the universe. Don’t let him be too late, she begged. She felt his warm assurance brush her thoughts, interweave with her soul. But she could also feel his tension, his worry, his fear.

  She knew the fear he felt was directed at them—for them—but she couldn’t shake the sense of danger she felt surrounding him, as well. She had left the security of his home so that he might be safe, and despite his assurance that the PRI men couldn’t do a thing to him, she didn’t believe it. She knew this to be incorrect.

  Whatever Teo might have projected to her about Pablo Sandoval’s motives, his reasons for telling her that Teo would be in danger if she stayed with him, she knew they were still valid. She knew, as Teo refused to see, that if he tried to interfere with the PRI’s determined plans to take Chris now, they would simply kill him.

  In coming to their rescue, he would be coming to his death. Everything in her cried out in negation of this, screamed a denial. And though Teo’s mental voice sent a multilayered blanket of reassurance, she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that things were far, far from well.