by Rachel Lee
A rusty laugh escaped Honor, and it struck her that she hadn’t laughed in two days now…and ordinarily she was quick to laugh. “Nothing in my life has ever been that easy.”
“Or mine.”
He went to get them some more coffee, and Honor watched him, noting how easily he moved, like a man in complete command of his body. He was used to being in command, that much was obvious. Faced with a ghost—or whatever awful thing was in that house—he considered himself quite capable of dealing with it. All he had to do was discover what needed doing. She liked his attitude and wished she could be so confident. All of her self-confidence was limited to nursing.
Turning her head, she stared past the reflections in the window glass and saw that the night was still storm-tossed, though it hadn’t yet begun to rain. Odd weather, she thought.
She had very nearly forgotten being locked in the closet as a child. Her father had meant it to toughen her and to stop her from seeing things in the dark. It might have toughened her, but now she was seeing things in the dark again. And in broad daylight, for that matter.
Looking back at those endless nights of terror, when she had cried and shrieked and begged for hours to be let out of that small, dark closet, she wondered if they hadn’t contributed to her mother’s decision to divorce her father.
What struck her most now, though, was that this was not the first time in her life she had had a brush with…with the occult, for lack of a better word. Time had rendered her memory hazy, but she vaguely remembered lying awake in her bed, hearing sounds in the night. Footsteps, when no one was there. Voices, sounding distant and garbled, when no one was talking. Sights…
She caught her breath and stiffened. Oh, Lord, she had seen something as a child. A figure. Something. It had terrified her, and when her father had locked her in the closet, it had been there, too. There had been no escape.
“Honor?”
Ian slid into the booth beside her and wrapped a powerful arm around her shoulders. “Shh…” he said softly. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
Accepting without question that he somehow knew she was feeling scared and frightened, she turned toward him and buried her face in his strong shoulder. The terror was a memory, she reminded herself, an old memory. She was reacting to something that no longer threatened her.
But oh, how good it felt to be held. He even smelled good, like laundry soap and man, and the cotton of his olive T-shirt was soft against her skin. But she couldn’t afford to notice things like that, she reminded herself. And this was certainly not the time or the place, anyway.
“I was remembering,” she said. “I’d nearly forgotten….”
“Tell me.”
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Who, me?”
A weak chuckle escaped her then, and she eased back from his shoulder. He released her at once, and she wished he hadn’t let go. Looking up almost shyly into his hard face, she found he was smiling faintly. Something about that smile made it possible to confide in him.
“When I was a kid, I saw and heard things in our house. My dad thought it was my imagination and locked me in the closet to break me of it.”
Ian frowned. “He’d be arrested for that nowadays.”
“Maybe. I don’t think he meant to be cruel. He wasn’t a cruel man. Just a hard one. What’s important, though, is that…well, I’ve been through something like this before. If it’s not my imagination—”
“It’s not,” he said, interrupting her. “I feel it, too. You’re sensitive, that’s all. I suspect some people wouldn’t feel a thing in that house.” He gave her another, very faint smile. “Some very dense people might not feel anything,” he amended. “Whatever it is, it’s strong.”
“And getting stronger,” Honor whispered, battling a sudden urge to look over her shoulder. The idea appalled her.
“Maybe not. I mean, if your father locked you in the closet to get you to suppress your sensitivity, it might just have taken a while for your awareness of this…thing to penetrate your barriers. It may have been this strong all along.” He shrugged. “We’re just speculating now, in any case. I suggest we wait until we find some useful information to base our theories on. In the meantime…”
Honor waited as he frowned thoughtfully, looking down at his coffee.
Here she was, sitting around talking of ghosts and other things that went bump in the night, and wishing that Ian McLaren would kiss her again, so that she could find out if the feelings she remembered from last night were real. Stupid. Incredible. But adrenaline had funny effects like that, she reminded herself. So maybe it wasn’t stupid that she was thinking about sex when she ought to be thinking about how she was going to save her house from whatever was occupying it. Of course, maybe she was just overloaded. Maybe she just needed a break, and thinking about her attraction to Ian was a great break from other things.
It might be a dangerous attraction, she found herself thinking. What did she really know about him…except that as a child people had thought he was possessed? Well, with those eyes…
Suddenly those eyes were fixed on her. “We’ve got a little time yet. Want to take a walk?”
Walking at night was something she had nearly given up doing, because it just wasn’t safe for a woman alone, and she’d seen too much in the emergency room to remain ignorant of the hazards. Walking with Ian, all six-foot-five and two-hundred-plus pounds of him, made her feel completely safe. She was able to throw back her head, enjoy the stiff breeze and the smell of the sea. The storm had moved far enough away that she didn’t think lightning was a real danger…though it still flickered off to the northwest.
They walked away from the bright lights and onto the athletic field of a nearby school. There they could see the silver-lined storm clouds when the moon occasionally peeked through.
“Some night,” Ian remarked, “we’ll have to take a walk on the beach. When the moon is full.”
“I’d love that.” Amazed that he was planning such things for them, she turned and peered up at him. He looked even more mysterious than usual in the uncertain light. Lightning flashed to the east, causing the shadow on his face to shift strangely. Even in this poor light, his eyes seemed to glow.
Surely, said a faint little voice in her head, she ought to be afraid of this huge man she hardly knew? But she wasn’t. Not at all. Not at this moment. What she felt—all she felt—was an urgent desire to be kissed by him.
He read minds. She became almost convinced of it when his strong arms suddenly closed around her and drew her against him. Suddenly aware of the nerve-exciting textures of man, muscle and denim, she felt her knees turn soft.
“Me too,” he said huskily. “Me too.”
She wondered what he meant, but then she didn’t care, because he lifted her right off her feet and brought her eager mouth to his. Strong. He was so strong. He made her feel small, delicate, fragile…and for once she didn’t mind.
Caution was swept away on a riptide of long-buried passion. All the things she had denied herself, all the things she had thought she would never know, were suddenly within her grasp. Her arms wrapped around broad shoulders, and she reveled in the powerful flexing of his muscles as he held her effortlessly above the ground. Such a large, strong man. Every cell in her body responded to his potency.
And every wounded cell in her heart responded to the unmistakable evidence that he desired her.
He held her with one arm around her waist, as if she weighed nothing, and allowed his other hand to roam. Downward it swept, slowly, along the slender line of her back, the soft curve of her hip, to the silky skin of the back of her thigh. She gasped against his mouth at the exquisite sensation of his callused palm on her sensitive skin and tightened her arms unconsciously, trying to get closer still.
With steady, gentle pressure, he brought her leg up to his waist, and suddenly she was pressed with breath-stealing intimacy against his arousal, while his tongue pillaged her mouth in a blatant imit
ation of mating.
She had never…not in her wildest dreams… Her fingers dug into the corded muscles of his shoulders, and she tore her mouth from his, throwing her head back in surrender as she abandoned herself to sensations beyond imagining. An extraordinary tension filled her, a wild expectancy that made everything else seem insignificant in comparison.
She wanted. Blindly, heedlessly, instinctively, she wanted this man.
How did he do this to her?
The thought flashed in her brain like a warning beacon. This was too fast, too hot, too wild. Unnatural. Abomination.
A groan erupted from the chest of the man who held her, the man who had mesmerized her, bewitched her and turned her into flame. Suddenly she was on her feet, free of him, except for the hands that steadied her gently. Then, when he had made sure she wouldn’t stumble, he turned his back to her.
Stunned by what had just passed between them, and by the abrupt change, Honor simply stood and stared at his back. She could feel it, she thought crazily. She could feel the control he exerted now as he stood with his hands on his hips and his head thrown back and waited for his own needs to subside. She could feel it as surely as she could feel her own body shriek its disappointment and its hunger.
She hurt. He hurt.
What had happened?
Abomination. The word twisted coldly through her mind, as repulsive and disturbing as a clammy touch. Alien. Not hers.
Troubled, frightened, she wrapped her arms around herself, feeling cold despite the muggy heat of the Florida night. Thunder rumbled distantly, an edgy reminder of a storm that had not yet broken.
“Ian?”
She said his name softly, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper, but he heard her and turned to face her.
“I…need to get to work.”
After a moment, he nodded. “Let’s go.”
He dropped Honor off at the emergency room entrance and watched her cross the twenty feet of concrete, her cute rump an incitement in those white shorts she was wearing. His palm remembered in exquisite detail just how the smooth skin of her thigh had felt, and the rest of him remembered with excruciating accuracy just how she had wrapped herself around him.
He was spending too much time with her. Getting drawn in too far. He’d slipped badly tonight. Very badly. She’d almost caught him out twice.
He had felt her yearning for him as strongly as he had felt his own for her. He wanted her. She wanted him. It should have been enough—except that he was…an abomination. She had sensed it, too, tonight. He had felt her alarm. Felt her recognition that something was unnatural. She just hadn’t realized that it was him.
He couldn’t afford to get close to her like that. Couldn’t afford to slip. Didn’t think he could stand to see the revulsion and fear on her face if she discovered his secret.
He had plenty of experience in keeping a safe distance, and the few relationships with women he’d allowed himself over the years had been chosen because they would preserve that distance. And always, always, if he felt that distance begin to erode to even a small degree, he’d left before the woman could discover what he really was.
It would be a damn sight more difficult to recover lost distance with his next-door neighbor. If he had half a brain, he would leave her to deal with her ghost by herself, let her get driven out of the place like all the other tenants.
Evidently he didn’t have half a brain. When she was safely inside, he turned his Jeep out of the lot and headed back down the highway toward home. He was going to check out that damn house. Tonight. While she wasn’t there to add to the psychic confusion in the place.
The wind was picking up again by the time he pulled into his driveway. A new storm was moving in, this one more restless than the last. Lightning flickered in sheets, and thunder growled hollowly.
When he had put the deadbolts on Honor’s doors, he had kept a key for himself—another in the long list of his transgressions in life. The problem with security, he had realized years ago, was that if you made it nearly impossible for someone to get in, you might pay a price for being unreachable. People burned to death in homes with barred windows. Medical help couldn’t reach you quickly if no one could break in.
So he had kept a key. And now with it, he let himself into her house. He didn’t bring a flashlight, because there was nothing he wanted to see. He stood inside her front door and closed his eyes.
And waited.
It was nearly dawn before he felt it. At first it was like a soft stirring of the psychic breeze, just a whisper of shifting shadows in the living room. Instinctively he turned toward it, though he would never see it with his eyes.
It strengthened slowly, as if waking from a long sleep. From a shifting in the shadows, from a whisper of movement, it grew. Dark. Roiling. Hateful. Evil.
Ah, God, so cold! It seemed to soak the last heat from the room, leaving a cold so intense it froze the soul. Oppressive. Suffocating. Like cold, oily smoke.
Aware. It was aware of him. It was gathering itself, gathering its strength and its hatred, and it knew him. Reaching out with icy tendrils of hate, it touched the edges of his mind and caused him to recoil helplessly.
Hunkering down and wrapping his arms around his knees for protection against a blast of cold that threatened frostbite, he waited it out. He needed knowledge of his enemy, and there was only one way to get it. Cautiously, he reached out with his mind.
And nearly died.
In an instant he was back in the pit that haunted his worst nightmares. Tied ankle and wrist with wire that cut to the bone. Helpless to protect himself. Helpless against the demon who tortured him. Naked to the eyes of his enemy. Knowing his every stifled scream of agony gave pleasure, because he could feel it with his abominable talent, could feel the pleasure of the men who tortured him. Wanting to die with a passion that beggared description, because it was his only way out.
No!
The word exploded in his head like a thunderclap as he grabbed for his self-control and refused to allow the vision power over him. Heedless of the cold that flayed his skin, he rose in the dark and faced his invisible tormentor.
No. By sheer effort of will, he forced his mind into the present, forced it to bury again what had happened in the past. He had been there. He refused to allow a mere memory to wield that kind of power over him.
He was shivering violently now, from the cold that had swallowed all the heat, and he still hadn’t found what he needed. Hate. It was full of hate. Rage. Bitterness. But nothing he could use against it.
Then, suddenly, something shifted. Something changed, a new scent on the wind. The cold withdrew a little; the direction of the hate turned a little.
A change of focus.
Seizing the opportunity, Ian reached out, seeking a clue, a weakness…anything.
What he found was another presence. Outside the house. Drawing closer. Bent on murder.
Turning, he dismissed the evil inside the house to concentrate on the threat outside. Cold breath brushed his neck, making his scalp prickle, but he ignored it, concentrating on the new threat, instead.
Fractured images filled his head, battlefield nightmares, the worst of the things he had ever seen in his life, as the hateful thing in the house assaulted his mind. Dismembered bodies, screaming friends, dead buddies. With a monumental effort of will, he ignored the visions that always haunted him, refusing to give a toehold to the thing that would use them against him.
He was still cold, but sweat broke out all over him, soaking him, as he wrestled for supremacy over his own mind. And the thing outside drew closer. It had been summoned.
Grabbing the doorknob, he twisted it and pulled the door open. The real threat was outside, and he had to face it.
But suddenly he froze, as the cold touched the edges of his mind again. And buried deep in that cold and hate and rage, he thought he felt the touch of something…not exactly familiar, but something he had touched once before.
Before he
could latch on to it, though, it vanished. Thunder cracked deafeningly, and the wind moaned around the corner of the house, reminding him where he was. When he was. The darkness in the living room shrank a little, pulling away from him.
And the thing outside was almost here. Swinging the door open the rest of the way, he stepped out into the wild darkness. The storm was right overhead now, and the old live oaks groaned before the buffeting of the wind.
A fork of lightning zigzagged downward, striking a tree farther up the road. The concussion made his eardrums hurt, almost distracting him from the awareness that something was watching. From out there. From across the road.
Keeping low, Ian hurried down off the porch and around to the side, so that he could circle around and come up behind whoever—or whatever—was over there.
Across the road, though a few scrubby pines grew tall, for some reason the vegetation was nearly tropical. Palmettos and ferns that had never been disturbed by man grew thickly. Running on silent feet, crouching to keep a low profile, Ian hurried fifty or sixty yards up the road and then crossed over. Behind him, he felt the presence in the house fade a little, weakening. As if it had used all the energy it could. Or as if its attention had turned elsewhere.
And then he discovered why he’d considered this threat worse than the one in the house.
Thunder cracked loudly, and lightning flared, illuminating the night. Then there was another sharp crack, an unnatural one.
Pain seared his side, and he went down. He’d been shot.
Thunder growled like a hungry beast at bay. Lightning slashed jaggedly toward the horizon from heavy clouds that hid the early-dawn light. On a clear day, the sky would be brightening by this time. Today it was a dark, leaden gray.
Ian didn’t show up at 7:30. By eight, Honor was feeling impatient and irritated. This was why she hated to depend on someone else for transport.
By 8:30 she was beginning to worry about him. He didn’t seem like an undependable sort of person, whatever else he might be. She called his house and received no answer.