Imminent Thunder

by Rachel Lee

  “Accidents happen.”

  “Reckon so.” He glanced up with a smile, a smile that Honor thought didn’t quite reach his eyes. Then he went back to whistling.

  He next spoke when they were upstairs in her bedroom. “That fella next door?”

  “My neighbor, you mean?”

  “Him. McLaren. He grew up in these parts.”

  “Did he? He didn’t mention that.”

  “Don’t reckon he wants anyone to know.”

  Honor bit her lip, torn between wanting to ask why and hating to gossip about someone she knew. In the end she said nothing at all, even though she knew her curiosity was going to drive her wild. She had no business listening to idle gossip, she told herself sternly. No business at all.

  “There was some trouble, long time ago,” Cal said some time later. “There was some talk about witchcraft and satanism. Talk of animal sacrifices. Don’t know if it’s true. But he left and didn’t come back until a year or so ago.”

  Honor’s hand flew to her mouth, and she stood there, trying to reconcile what she had just heard with the man who had so carefully protected her. “I can’t…I can’t imagine him doing such things,” she said finally, feeling sick. Animal sacrifices?

  “Don’t know that he did.” Cal plugged his meter into another outlet and watched the needle. “There was talk, I’m told, and the cops looked into it, but nothing ever happened, so maybe there’s nothing to it.” He glanced up then, his dark eyes strangely opaque. “I just thought a woman living alone ought to be on guard. In case. That’s all.”

  The wiring had checked out okay. Around lunchtime, Honor stood in her bedroom, in front of the dresser mirror, and studied her reflection. Ian would be coming at any moment to take her to the beach, and the blue maillot that had seemed so modest last year didn’t strike her as modest now. Turning swiftly away, she grabbed her white shorts and blue T-shirt and tugged them on.

  Witchcraft and satanism.

  God! Why hadn’t she stayed in Seattle? At least there the threats had been known. During the past two days, she seemed to have stepped off the edge of reality into something really…weird. Strange. Spooky.

  A rustling overhead drew her eyes upward. It sounded like something moving in the attic. Bugs, she told herself. Mice. Lizards. Maybe just a branch of one of the damn trees outside. There was nothing else up there.

  She tugged her sneakers on and picked up her beach bag, checking to make sure she had included her sunscreen and keys.

  A public beach in broad daylight. She couldn’t possibly have anything to fear. And why should she fear him, anyway, just because of a piece of vicious gossip about things that might or might not have happened half a lifetime ago? Hadn’t he taken care of her the last couple of days? If he was any threat at all, surely she would know by now. For heaven’s sake, she had spent the last two nights under his roof! Safely. If he was going to harm her, he’d had ample opportunity to do so!

  A rattle at the window snared her attention, and she looked out through the glass at the bright day beyond. She had chosen this room for her bedroom because a hole in the trees provided a view of the sky and road out front. Because it didn’t feel so closed in.

  The rattle came again, and she darted over to the window to look out. Down below, standing far enough back to be seen over the edge of the porch roof, was Ian. When he saw her, he pointed to his watch and then held up five fingers.

  He had thrown pebbles at her window to get her attention, and the silly gesture eased some of the tension inside her. He could have phoned. He could have come right to the door. He could simply have shown up whenever he was ready. Instead, he had done something fun. Feeling somehow reassured, she waved and smiled back.

  Above her, something in the attic made a soft scratching sound. Just a muffled, odd little sound. She glanced up and then dismissed it. Not forty minutes ago she had been up there with the electrician. A roach had gotten into the ceiling, she told herself. Or a mouse.

  She rather liked the idea of a small gray mouse.

  Ian took them away from the base, out across Choctawhatchee Bay to a strip of Gulf beach that was sparkling-white and virtually empty. A few vacation houses occupied the heights of the dunes, but they appeared to be deserted today. Here and there other couples were visible, but no one close by.

  The pristine white sand of the beach disappeared in the amazing aquamarine water of the shallows. A short distance from shore, the deeper water was demarcated by an abrupt change of color to royal blue. Honor had never forgotten the colors or the beauty of this coastline. It was that memory that had brought her back.

  She helped Ian secure the corners of the blanket with her beach bag and towel. Then he reached for his olive-drab T-shirt and tugged it over his head. She looked quickly away, feeling somehow that the act of stripping to a bathing suit was an intimate one. Which was silly, because she had never felt that way before.

  She tossed her shorts and shirt aside without once looking at him, and trotted down to the water without daring a backward glance. She didn’t want to know if he was watching her, didn’t know what she would do if he was. The memory of last night’s kiss was seared into her brain and made even the electrician’s warning seem like a dim recollection from the distant past.

  The swells were too big to allow any serious swimming, so she finally found a shallow spot and sat in the water, allowing the swells to lift and drop her gently, like a baby rocking in a cradle. The sun was hot and strong, and soon baked the tension from her muscles.

  Feeling calm and utterly secure for the first time in what seemed like forever, she let herself think over the events of the past couple of days. What, she asked herself, had really happened? Not much. Somebody had apparently been in her house when she came home the night before last. Other than that, there had been nothing at all. Last night had been a case of nerves from a defective light. No one had been in the house.

  And the feeling of being watched, of a presence…well, that was just imagination. She had been scared, and her mind had found no difficulty in embroidering things and turning imagined threats into reality. It was easy for the mind to play tricks like that in the dark. She’d learned that as a kid, sitting around campfires with her friends. More than once, ten shrieking girls had dived for cover over something as simple as a hooting owl. Fear of bears and Bigfoot had been half the fun of those campfires.

  A gloomy sigh, swallowed by the restless sounds of the waves, escaped her. The wonder of it, she decided, was that Ian could take her seriously. In retrospect, she was surprised that he hadn’t just left her in her own place last night. After all, he had checked the house and found no one there. At that point, any danger had been purely imaginary.

  A tingling along her shoulders finally warned her that she was in danger of burning. Reluctantly leaving the water, she walked up the beach, only to find Ian stretched out and sound asleep.

  For long moments she simply stared at him, filling her eyes with his powerful masculine beauty. Little was left to the imagination by his brief black trunks, and it didn’t feel as if she were invading his privacy simply by standing there and gazing at what he was so blatantly displaying.

  His chest was every bit as broad, hard and powerful as she remembered, and when he was lying down like this, his flat stomach turned into a hollow. His legs were long, perfectly shaped, powerful, and dusted with golden-brown hair that looked soft. Tempting. Her palms itched with a desire to discover all those masculine textures. Ridiculous, she told herself, and plopped on the blanket beside him. Ridiculous. Tugging her T-shirt out of her bag, she pulled it on to protect her shoulders.

  Oh, God, she thought suddenly, she didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to go back to that house. There was no escaping it. She could sit here in the sun and pretend that all those bad feelings had been imagination, that she honestly believed she had nothing to fear, but that was all it was: pretending. Something about that house scared her the way the dark under her bed had sca
red her as a child. It didn’t matter whether it was rational or not.

  The sun still shone, but somehow the day had turned suddenly dark. Shivering despite the heat, she looked around her and wondered what had happened to the colors. The water was now more gray than blue, and choppy-looking, and the white sand, too, seemed to have lost its brilliance.

  Her gaze strayed inexorably toward Ian, and she wished he would wake up. Suddenly the beach felt deserted, lonely, and the sun didn’t feel quite so warm. She wished, incredibly, stupidly, that he would wake up and smile—she couldn’t remember having seen him really smile yet—and that he would reach for her and pull her down into his arms. That he would give her another kiss like the one last night.

  Animal sacrifices. It couldn’t be true. Could it?

  Suddenly Ian’s cat-green eyes opened, snaring hers with their intensity. Honor had the terrible feeling that he knew what she’d been thinking, that he had been hearing every thought that crossed her mind. Crazy, she thought, even as her insides fluttered nervously. Crazy. But the feeling that he had looked inside her head wouldn’t die.

  Then his eyes were hooded by lowered lashes, and he sat up.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you.”

  The innocuous, innocent comment almost startled her, when she had half expected him to mention the things that had been roiling in her thoughts. A couple of seconds passed while she gathered her scattered wits.

  “I didn’t mind,” she said finally. “We’re both a little short on rest after the last couple of nights.” Now that he was staring at the water instead of her, she felt more comfortable. “Did you really mean it when you said you don’t sleep at night?”

  “Yeah.” He drew one knee up and rested his forearm on it. “I’ve never needed much sleep. An hour or two here and there. I generally just nap when I need to. Like now.”

  “I don’t think I could stand that. I love to sleep.”

  He turned his head and gave her a faint smile. “I do, too. I wouldn’t mind doing it more often.”

  She smiled back at him and tried to ignore the niggling sense of unease the electrician had planted in her. No way was this man a satanist, she told herself. No way. He turned his attention back to the water, and she was free to run her gaze over his broad shoulders and powerfully muscled back. That was when she saw the scars. They were faint with age, almost invisible, but there were dozens of them, some looking like very old burns, some like knife slashes. She couldn’t keep from gasping.

  She couldn’t imagine how he heard that small, soft sound over the pounding surf, but he did. He didn’t turn his head to look at her, but he spoke.

  “A demon caught me once,” he said. “Years and years ago. Those are his marks.”

  She reached out instinctively, with a woman’s natural need to offer some kind of comfort, but he had already risen from the blanket and was striding down to the water.

  So alone, she thought, feeling tears prick at her eyes. He was so alone.

  But then, so was she.

  The light became flat, unnatural, as the sky grew hazy. There was nothing nearby to cast a shadow as brilliant colors turned leaden and the hot, humid air grew oppressive.

  Honor felt a chill run down her spine, despite the stifling heat of the day. It was eerie, she thought, this sultry, flat light, the way the waves suddenly seemed to have grown quiet. Even the eternal seashore breeze had grown still. Turning, she looked up and down the beach and saw not one other soul.

  Ian suddenly rose from the waves and walked up the sand toward her.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said as soon as he reached her.

  She tilted her head back and looked up at him. The sky was so bright behind him that he was little more than a dark shadow. “What’s wrong?”

  He squatted, bringing his face nearly level with hers. Now she was no longer blinded by the brilliance of the sky behind him and could make out his face. His green eyes seemed to glow, and she suddenly understood how tales of witchcraft might have surrounded him.

  “Tell me,” he said with quiet intensity, “just what you feel has been going on for the last couple of days. Don’t tell me the facts, don’t tell me what you want to think happened. Just tell me what you feel is going on.”

  Her breath jammed in her throat. Say those things out loud? Things about feeling some kind of evil presence when she was all alone? Things about hating that living room, about the odor of decay that seemed to permeate the whole house, an odor she was sure hadn’t been there when she bought it. Admit that the shadows beneath the old live oaks seemed to be alive somehow? Seemed to be occupied by things that, though unseen, she felt right at the base of her skull? Things she hadn’t even admitted to herself? Things so fanciful and impossible that she hardly dared let the thought of them cross her mind?

  The hazy light, so peculiar, cast no shadows across his face, and it made him look strange, like a painting with two real, glowing eyes looking out of it. “What do you feel?” he asked again.

  She wanted to look away, but somehow she couldn’t. His eyes were mesmerizing; they held her. She finally spoke, words springing to her lips before she was even conscious of them. “When I was little, I thought there was a crocodile in the dark under my bed.”

  He nodded. “I had a bear in my closet.”

  Somehow that made it easier. A long breath escaped her. “I feel that way about…about the house. About the dark in the corners and under the trees and in the attic—” She shook her head, denying what she said even as she said it. “There wasn’t anything under my bed when I was a kid.” She looked away, feeling an almost physical ripping as she tore her eyes from his. “I feel…I feel…” She could barely whisper the words.

  “What do you feel? What?”

  “As if…somebody’s trying to get into my head.” The words spilled out of her in a long, breathless rush, taking form on the sultry air before she was even conscious of having felt such a thing. Where had that come from?

  She turned swiftly, expecting to see shock on Ian’s face, but he looked as impassive as always. A protest spilled from her lips just as swiftly, trying to banish the words she had just spoken. Trying to deny the reality of the awareness they had unleashed. “I didn’t mean that. God, I don’t know why I said that!”

  “Shh…” He touched a finger to her lips, then dropped it. “It’s okay. I asked what you felt. I didn’t ask for reasons. Some things don’t have reasons.”

  He looked around at the strange, flat light, at the gray water and dull sand. “Something’s going on. Something…unnatural. I feel it, too.”

  “It’s crazy!” She knew the protest was useless even as she made it.

  He shook his head, and suddenly his unearthly eyes were fixed on her again. “I’m a soldier. I feel it at the base of my skull when someone’s watching me. I don’t question the feeling. I act on it. It’s saved my life more than once.”

  Icy tendrils wrapped slowly around her spine. “Someone’s watching.” She felt it, too. Had felt it all along.

  He nodded. “I thought we’d get away from it by coming out here.” He scanned the beach and dunes again, evidently seeking the watcher and seeing no one. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s just drive somewhere and see if we can’t find some privacy to talk.”

  It wasn’t until later that she wondered about his motives. For all that he appeared to be concerned for her safety, he spent an awful lot of time scaring her even more. Instead of reassuring her, he terrified her. Instead of promising that locks would protect her, he spoke of demons.

  What if he was taking advantage of the situation to terrify her? What if he was engaging in some kind of psychological warfare to scare her out of her wits? To drive her away? Or drive her over the edge?

  Abomination. Witch’s spawn. The words whispered through her mind again, cold and deadly. Once again she tried to ignore them. They were not real. They came from some buried corridor of the subconscious, stirred up by her f
right, and they were meaningless.

  Or were they?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ian pointed his Jeep away from the base, taking them even farther from home. Honor knew a prickle of unease, wondering if she were utterly foolish to go so far—to go anywhere—with this man. Trusting him because he was a former Ranger, like her father, was like trusting someone because of his hair color—foolhardy.

  Yet she would have bet, despite all her doubts about his motives and whether he was trying to scare her half to death, that he meant her no physical harm. She was betting precisely that, she realized with an unpleasant lurch of her stomach as they headed into one of the more sparsely populated parts of the Panhandle. Just by being here she was betting on her safety.

  Half an hour later Ian wheeled off the road into the parking lot of one of those unexpected restaurants that sometimes appeared in the middle of nowhere in this part of the world. There were several cars in the lot, though at midafternoon it wasn’t likely to be busy.

  “They have great seafood here,” Ian told her as he parked. “Local catch, fresh daily. Interested?”

  She definitely was, especially with her nerves quieting at the prospect of a public place.

  Inside, a couple of men sat at the bar, sipping beer. They looked up and nodded as Ian and Honor entered. Quiet country music played in the background.

  “Seat yourselves, folks,” the bartender said. “Wilma’ll be right with you.”

  By the time they’d been served a pitcher of draft beer and a huge basket of deep-fried shrimp, Honor realized that for the first time in days she was actually beginning to relax. It felt somewhat like waking from a bad dream, or getting over the flu, to have the tension really gone. And only as it lifted did she realize just how tense and uneasy she had been.

  Even Ian seemed to be relaxing in some subtle way, she realized. He was leaning back, legs loosely crossed, one arm slung casually over the back of his chair. From time to time he reached out and popped another shrimp into his mouth. The thing that struck her most, though, was the subtle change in his face. It no longer looked quite so hard or forbidding, so rocklike.