Imminent Thunder

by Rachel Lee

  Whether he admitted it or not, he had been hurt by the way people reacted to him, Honor thought. Between that and his telepathy, it was no wonder he lived behind impenetrable walls.

  It felt so good to have his arms around her again, so good to lean against his strength and feel welcome there. She clung to him for a long while, soaking up his warmth, and the scent that was uniquely his.

  “You didn’t hurt me,” she said. “And that’s all that matters.”

  One of his big hands found her hair and tunneled into it, combing gently. “I’ve never met anybody like you,” he said roughly. “Anybody else would have run from me ten times over.”

  “I guess you haven’t been looking in the right places. I’m nothing special.”

  Bending, he kissed the top of her head again. “That’s what you think. Come on, let’s go inside. I don’t want anyone to see you out here with me like this.”

  At this hour of the morning? Honor wondered. Who could possibly be watching? And then she remembered the person who had shot Ian, the person the ghost had been calling. He might be out and about. The thought was like a chill breath on the back of her neck.

  “Sorry,” he said, hustling her through the door. “I’m great at destroying a mood, too.”

  When they were inside and he was locking the door, Honor turned on him. “Damn it, Ian, quit apologizing for everything. There’s not one thing you need to apologize for! I’m the one who hit you, and I deserved to be swatted back. If I were a man, you’d probably have nailed me to the floor.”

  Satisified with the deadbolt, he faced her. “Maybe.”

  “There’s no maybe about it. All you did was scare me a little. Quit worrying. Quit worrying about everything.” She hated this. Hated knowing just how abnormal he felt he was. Only years of experience could have made him feel that everything about him was wrong, from his size to his eyes.

  Reaching out, she touched his arm. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” she said softly. “Not one damn thing. You’re different, but different is not the same thing as wrong.”

  “There are a lot of people who wouldn’t agree with you.” He spoke stiffly, as if for some reason he was afraid to relax.

  “Maybe so, but they’re not here right now.” And suddenly it was all very clear to her. Maybe she didn’t trust this man with her heart, maybe she still wondered if he could be influenced by the ghost the way she had been, but it was eminently clear now that he would never purposely hurt her.

  But he expected her to be afraid of him, as so many others had been. He never entirely relaxed, always maintained a rigid control, for fear he might do something to scare her—as he had when he pinned her to the mattress. Yes, she had been scared. Terrified, even. But the important point was that he had not hurt her.

  He stood now in the kitchen, unselfconsciously naked, a magnificent man who had been shunned all his life because he was a telepath and because he was a deadly fighting machine. He said he didn’t care; she didn’t believe it.

  She took his hand gently. Raising it to her lips, she kissed the backs of his fingers and then his palm. “Everything else aside, Ian, I am not afraid of you.”

  She heard him catch his breath. Then, with the swiftness of a striking hawk, he scooped her up into his arms and headed for the stairs.

  Honor knew exactly what was coming, and arousal trickled through her to her center, tingling and warm. Life had turned him into a closed-up, locked-up man, and he had only one means of expression still left to him. What he couldn’t say with words, he could say with his body.

  And, oh, was she ready to listen!

  He was gentle at first, taking exquisite care, treating her as if she were priceless crystal. But then, at some point, he dared to let go, dared to test her declaration that she wasn’t afraid of him. Dared to be himself without inhibition.

  It was like catching a ride on a cyclone, Honor thought dimly and much later, when she lay trembling beneath his sweaty, exhausted body. Like riding a rocket, or driving a car without brakes. The whirlwind had swept her up and carried her to a world of sensations so intense they surpassed thought.

  And there she had found a long-lost piece of herself. Smiling, she held Ian close and slipped away into a deep restful sleep.

  Ian didn’t sleep. He had made the ghost aware of him, and he felt the threat strengthening. Directed at him now, he thought, and not Honor at all. While she slept deeply, he went to stand at the window and watch her house through the trees. Lights flickered in the windows, in a restless movement that bounced here and there in seeming frustration. He felt it commanding him to come, but he would choose his own time.

  It seemed, he found himself thinking, that he and Mrs. Gilhooley were fated to have it out. He was reluctant to think in terms of destiny and eternity, and his faith had been all but destroyed in childhood, but he stood in the dark and looked over at Mrs. Gilhooley’s house and wondered why he and that nasty old woman had been locked in mortal combat since his childhood, and why the conflict seemed to have extended beyond the grave.

  Given a different life, he might have been a mystic, but he wasn’t a mystic, and he felt uneasy with the ideas that were rolling around in his mind now. It was, he told himself, simple happenstance. If he hadn’t felt compelled to return to this house to prove to himself that the terrors of his childhood no longer had the power to hurt him, he never would have run into this mess.

  He had meant his return here to be a kind of excision, a cutting-away of old scar tissue. He had told himself he was setting himself free of the last of his emotional baggage, that when he had dealt with the memories this place represented, he would be beyond the reach of anything and anyone.

  Instead he found himself faced with his old nemesis and collecting fresh baggage. Wherever he went now, Honor Nightingale would haunt him. The first woman, the only woman, not to be afraid of his strange talent. The first person to become aware of his talent without thinking of him as an abomination.

  This bedroom he stood in now had been his as a child. The one in which Honor had slept had belonged to his older brother, long dead. His parents’ room was empty of everything, cleared out by him to remove the last traces of an abusive father and a mother who had refused to touch him ever again from the day the church had shunned him.

  Nothing his father had done to him had cut him as deeply as what his mother had refused to do. He had locked those memories in the deepest, darkest vault of his mind, then had come home specifically to dig them up, face them and toss them away. It seemed amazing now, and even a little ironic, that Honor had accomplished with a few words what he hadn’t managed to do in nearly a full year. She had set him free of his past.

  Except for Mrs. Gilhooley, of course. There was one last raveled end to deal with, and he would deal with it first thing in the morning. The old woman had met her match. Ian McLaren was going to uncover her secret—or die trying.

  “How are we going to do this?” Honor asked.

  They were standing in front of her house, looking at the black, empty windows. The day had turned sunny and hot, though it was still early, and humid. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm and wished a breeze would stir.

  “It seems quiet this morning,” Ian said. “She was restless all night, but now…it’s as if she’s asleep.”

  Honor felt a chill despite the heat. It was disturbing to hear Ian refer to that thing as she.

  “I guess it’ll be safe if we split up,” Ian said. “If she starts to get active, I should sense it. I’ll start on the second floor, and you start in the front down here. I’ll work my way up to the attic, while you go through everything on the ground floor.” He turned and looked down at her. “I know it’s a bigger task downstairs, but you’re better equipped to tell what’s yours and what isn’t. And I’ll leave your bedroom for last, so we can do that together.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Unless you’d rather we do it together. We can start in the attic.”

  F
or some reason she remembered the chill she often felt at the foot of the attic ladder and shook her head. “No, this is fine.” Bad enough that she would have to go into the living room. Her mind had retained an indelible image of the swirling darkness that had surrounded Ian last night.

  “If we start to come close to what we’re looking for,” he continued, “we may stir her up. I should sense that, too.”

  “That would be a dead giveaway, if the ghost starts getting nervous.”

  One corner of his mouth hitched upward. “We can always hope.”

  It was really too hot for jeans, but Ian had insisted on protective clothing again. Inside the house it was cooler, from the air-conditioning, but the carrion smell had become almost asphyxiating. Gagging, Honor had to back right out the door, but Ian forged forward with a trash bag and picked up all the rotting meat.

  “At least she didn’t smear it all over the walls,” he remarked as he passed Honor on his way out with the bag.

  They opened all the doors and windows and turned on the house fan to blow the smell away, and Honor mopped the hallway with vinegar. When she had finished, the smell seemed nearly gone—or maybe her nose had just turned off, she thought sourly. Damn the old woman, anyway!

  She didn’t feel nearly so defiant, though, when Ian had at last gone upstairs and she was left alone in the hallway, facing the living room. There was no longer any doubt in her mind as to why she had hesitated to paint and furnish the room. If evil had a smell, that room reeked of it.

  “Miss Honor?”

  Startled, she whirled around and then sighed with relief when she recognized Jeb Sidell. He was plainly agitated, shifting from one foot to the other and twisting a porkpie hat in his hands. “What’s wrong?”

  “Orville. He fell, and his leg busted like bad wood, and he’s bleeding bad. My ma’s calling for help, but—”

  She ran upstairs to grab some clean pillowcases to use to make a pressure bandage. Pausing by the foot of the attic ladder, she ignored the clammy chill that clung there and called up to Ian.

  “I’m going out with Jeb! Orville broke his leg and needs help!”

  She didn’t wait to hear if he answered. Splints. She needed something to use for splints. Forget that. It would take too long. The bleeding had to be stopped before anything else could be dealt with.

  Downstairs, she hurried out the door, Jeb on her heels. “Where is he?”

  “I’ll drive,” Jeb said, pointing at a beat-up old truck. “We’ll get there faster.”

  She climbed up into the cab, hoping against hope that it wasn’t too late for the little boy.

  A surprising number of the attic floorboards were loose, as if no one had ever bothered to drive the nails back in as they worked free over time. In many places, the nails were entirely gone. And beneath each loose board was an easy hiding place between the joists that supported the flooring. A careful inspection of the lath showed that it, too, was loose in places and concealed fair-sized spaces between itself and the wood.

  It would take a couple of hours, at least, to explore all the possible hiding places in the attic, Ian estimated. Mentally he blocked the entire area off in sections, intending to search section by section from one end to the other.

  As he worked, he whistled softly, a habit from childhood that he’d nearly forgotten. Back then he’d whistled most of the time to avoid hearing what people were thinking. It made a kind of screen, concentrating on something like a melody. He did it now without even thinking about it. Not initially.

  At some point he felt the day beginning to darken. Sitting back on his heels, he dropped a board back into place and looked toward one of the round attic windows. Beyond the filmy, dusty glass, the sky looked as blue as ever, but the sense of darkening was still there.

  Glancing around, he saw that the warm-toned wood looked oddly gray, and that the light coming through the windows seemed to have lost its brightness. A glance at his watch told him it was just past noon. Too early for the light to change so drastically.

  Getting to his feet, he walked over to the west window and looked down from the same place where Mrs. Gilhooley had stood when she shoved her first husband to his death. Nothing looked different out there, he thought.

  Turning, he stared across the length of the attic to the other round window. There, near the middle of the attic, he thought he saw a shimmering in the air, a distortion like heat waves over pavement. The attic might almost be that hot, he thought, but something wasn’t quite right. Something about the way the air moved, the way the room beyond it was not only distorted, but subtly darkened, as well.

  He smiled then, a private, rare expression of satisfaction. “We’re getting close, aren’t we, you old bitch?”

  If he had hoped to provoke some kind of response, he was disappointed. The shimmering remained unaffected, the light staying oddly darkened. He waited a few minutes, wondering if something else would happen, or if the disturbance would disappear.

  When nothing at all changed, he shrugged and reached for another board to lift. That was when it occurred to him to wonder if Honor was experiencing anything strange. If she wasn’t then he would be willing to bet the item they sought was somewhere in the attic. If she was…well, they wouldn’t be any worse off than they had been to start with.

  He had to pass through the shimmering area to reach the ladder. The sensation was faintly unpleasant, cold and damp, like a cave, or a tomb, but after last night’s encounter he hardly noticed it.

  Until he reached the other side. In an instant he realized he had been duped, and fury rose hot in his blood. Turning, he looked back at the shimmering, and saw that it was a wall, ceiling to floor. And just beyond it he saw the faint gray smoke that he knew was Mrs. Gilhooley.

  Sounds filled his ears now, the normal sounds of a house, of the breeze outside. Once again his mind picked up impressions, mostly vague thoughts cast adrift in the psychic either by people he would never know. All the background cacophony of life.

  Sounds neither his ear nor his mind had heard for…hours? It had been so subtle that he didn’t even know when it had been. He had been cut off. Deliberately.

  But why?

  And he thought of Honor.

  He hadn’t heard a sound from downstairs since the old woman had cut him off. Anything could have happened.

  He dashed down the attic stairs, hoping against hope—yet he already knew. Free of the old woman’s deception, he could feel Honor’s absence as surely as he would have felt it if his heart had been ripped out.

  The door of the linen closet in the hall stood partway open. It had been closed when he had gone up to the attic, so she had been up here since. He opened it wide, peered in and saw nothing amiss. He could feel her there, though, could sense in some subtle way that she had touched these things just recently. But why? He scanned neat stacks of towels and sheets and could see no answer.

  Her room was undisturbed, as far as he could tell. There was no sign of a struggle, at any rate, and no sign of a hurried departure. He wondered if Mrs. Gilhooley had managed to scare her away again. Maybe Honor was running from him again, as she had just the other night.

  Downstairs, he walked through the undisturbed rooms and found nothing. Only the front door, unlocked, told him anything at all. Outside, he found tire tracks in the driveway behind her car, which hadn’t been moved since well before the last heavy rain. Someone had been here this morning.

  Someone had been here, and now Honor was gone. And the only clue he had was tire tracks that headed out toward the highway. Standing beside the dirt road, he followed them with his eyes. And then he noticed that they had initially come from the other direction. From up the road, toward the Sidells’ place.

  Moments later he was backing out of his driveway and heading up the road to question a woman who had spoken to him only once in thirty-five years, and then to call him a murderer and wish him an eternity in hell.

  She was sitting on the porch of a run-down house, looking a
s run-down as a woman of forty could manage. Too thin, too worn, she had plainly had a hard life. She didn’t move when Ian climbed out of his Jeep, and no one came out of the house to join her. It was just the two of them and the stifling Florida day.

  “Annie.” He nodded, staying well back, not wanting to frighten her by approaching.

  “Ian.” She didn’t nod, but she didn’t look away or get up and leave. “Heard you were back.”

  A year ago, he thought. He’d come back a year ago, and she acted as if she’d just heard it. But the old bitterness was nothing beside his current worry. “Yeah. You got your wish, Annie.”

  She cocked her head a little. “I never got a wish in my life. What’re you talking about?”

  “You wished me to hell. I went.”

  For a long moment, she stared unwaveringly at him, her lips compressed. Then she nodded. “Me too, Ian. Me too. My boys are good, but—” She cut herself off sharply and shook her head.

  Ian didn’t need to hear the rest of the sentence to know Jack Sidell had the temper of an ornery rattler. At least she was talking to him. “I’m looking for my neighbor lady, Honor Nightingale.”

  “The nurse lady. She ain’t been here, for sure.”

  “Well, we were at her place. I was doing something in the attic for her. When I came down, she was gone. Never said a word. Didn’t leave a note or anything, but her car’s there. And I saw some tire tracks in her driveway. They came from up here, pulled in the drive, then headed out to the highway. Anybody been up this way this morning?”

  Annie shook her head and lifted a chapped hand to brush sweat from her brow. “Sure been hot.”

  “Mmm…”

  “Jeb headed out to town ’bout an hour ago. Said he didn’t know when he’d be back. Still looking for work. They don’t hire him too quick, ’cause he’s slow, but he’s a hard worker. Ain’t never been fired from a job.”

  Ian nodded, restraining his impatience. “I’ve heard good about the boy.”

  “Nobody’s got a bad word for any of my boys. I raised ’em right.”