by Anna Durand
He smiled, flashing neon-white teeth lined up in perfect rows. His cinnamon skin darkened a shade in the brilliance of his dental work. Oh yeah, no way those were natural teeth. "I've anticipated this meeting more than you know."
"How flattering." Crud. There she went again, mouthing off when she really wanted to cry or scream or bolt for the door. David called it her fortress of sarcasm. Not complimentary, but so true she winced even thinking about it. Today, she could use a fortress.
Amador folded his hands on his lap. "I do apologize for my intrusive methods. I hope you can forgive me."
"Forgive you?" She arched her eyebrows. "How about you try convincing me not to shoot you."
"Oh, you won't shoot me."
The utter certainty in his tone bristled her temper. She bit back a smart retort and instead asked, "How can you be so sure?"
"You avoid violence, and do harm only when absolutely necessary."
"You don't know me. Maybe I'm a ruthless killer."
He chuckled. The accompanying smile tightened the crow's feet around his eyes, and the lines around his mouth. A faint scar on his cheek danced. She couldn't blame him for laughing. Her statement sounded ludicrous even to her. Grace Powell, assassin for hire. Yeah, right.
"You are far too refined to be a murderer," Amador said. He rocked in his chair, aiming a faint smirk at her. "I am so pleased you've accepted my invitation. And may I say you are even more beautiful than I imagined. Quite stunning, actually."
She stared at him, her lips twisted into a half scowl. Flirting? Was he serious? If she threatened to stab him, maybe he'd propose marriage.
If David had spoken the same compliments, she would've blushed. Here, now, with this man, no such heat bloomed in her cheeks. Her stomach grumbled, but she doubted that had anything to do with Amador's flirtation. Something about him prickled her nerves. She trusted her intuition, and it warned her to take care in dealing with Amador. She pulled her purse snug against her body. The hard lump of her gun pressed into her flesh.
"I'm here," she said. "So can we cut the crap and get down to business?"
"I do enjoy your directness. It's refreshing, and immensely appealing."
She doubted her fiancé would agree. David, where are you? "I'm not trying to appeal to you, Mr. Amador. You're the one who invited me here. Time to prove I should stay."
"Of course."
"You claimed you could help me. What exactly did you mean?"
With one finger, he traced swirling lines on the smooth desktop. "I can help you understand your psychic abilities and use them to better effect. I know you suffer from debilitating migraines anytime you use your powers for more than a bit of remote reconnaissance. I can teach you how to set your powers free, so you will no longer suffer because of them."
She clenched her fists around her gun's outline. How the blazes did he know so much about her? Would he have risked insanity merely to read her mind and gain tidbits of knowledge about her?
Risk insanity? He must've tipped that boat a long time ago. No sane person would burrow into her mind, rummage around a bit, and then invite her over for a cozy chat.
Grace drummed her fingers on her purse, on the gun hidden beneath the vinyl. "Your offer sounds great. What's the catch?"
His brown eyes targeted her gaze, like a radar-guided missile zeroing in on its target. "You will need to drop whatever psychic shield you've erected."
"Mmm… no. What else have you got?"
A frown flickered across Amador's features, evaporating in the space of a heartbeat. "If you allow me to help you with your powers, then I will use all the money and influence at my disposal to help you find Karl Tesler."
Her heart skipped a beat. "Who?"
"Dr. Karl Tesler. The scientist David is searching for as we speak."
"I have no idea who that is."
He burrowed a hand through his black hair. "Really, Grace, I know you're lying. It's time we told each other the truth. I am not your enemy."
Right. Not her enemy. He was her new best friend. With fangs, venom, and a rattling tail.
Searing pain skewered her heart. She gasped. The pain spiked through her again, deeper, tearing into muscle and sinew. She clutched the chair's arms, panting, whimpering. Jesus, no. Tentacles of power cracked into her.
The agony dissolved into a yawning emptiness that ached in her heart.
She knew this ache. Not a physical pain. A psychic shock. And it radiated to her through a connection so intimate, so alive, that it smacked into her with physical force. She squeezed her eyes shut as a silent sob wrenched her body.
David was hurt. Screaming. Bleeding. Dying.
Behind the ache, an oily energy roiled. Its tentacles flailed, striving for purchase.
This was not from David. Someone, or something, was laying siege to her defenses. Her fears tricked her into believing the agony originated with David.
Boiling agony scorched her veins. Blades ripped her flesh. She toppled forward. Amador snared her in his muscular arms.
And she passed out.
Chapter Seven
The guard shoved David through the doorway into a shadowed room. The guards wore no name tags, and so he had no idea what to call them. Assholes came to mind, but he figured they wouldn't appreciate that.
David rubbed his shoulder, where the cretin had punched him when he protested at being separated from Sean. Another bruise on his forearm was blossoming a nice shade of plum. That one one he received for blinking, or maybe breathing. The guard hadn't specified.
He scuffled deeper into the room. His shoes scraped across the concrete floor. At a dozen feet wide and long, at most, the space pressed in around him. It reeked of sweat and blood and fear. A single bulb recessed into the ceiling spilled flickering light into the center of the room, but the sickly glow petered out before reaching the corners. A narrow wedge of brighter light from the corridor sliced through the gloom. David squinted. He still couldn't make out much besides the square shape of the prison cell.
And that's what it was. No bed, no chairs, nothing to provide a modicum of comfort. He kicked his toe into the bare concrete, catching it in a pit.
The guard kicked the door shut.
A locking mechanism chunked into position. David trudged further into the room. Halfway across the space, he stopped. A humanlike shape huddled in the far corner, masked in shadows and motionless as a boulder.
He had a cellmate.
The man's ebony skin blended into the gloom. Indirect light glimmered off his clean-shaved scalp. When he lifted his head to gaze at David, the whites of the man's eyes almost glowed. A trick of the dim light, David knew. Still, the sight of the pure white of the man's eyes, with inky disks at their centers, made David hesitate.
At the Mojave Desert facility, the scientists locked him in a cell outfitted like a hospital room, without the windows. His captors kept the door sealed at all times and, toward the end, they sedated him into unconsciousness. Here in Montana, without JT at the helm, Tesler clearly adopted a new tactic for imprisoning psychics, something closer to the way prisons operated. At least the guard removed the zip tie from his wrists before dumping him into the cell.
A spasm wrenched his entire body. Electric shocks ripped his flesh.
He staggered into the wall, gasping, his chest racked with pains. His spine contorted, as if a wire threaded through it was yanked taut. Sweat rolled down his temples, and blackness dotted his vision. He slumped against the concrete wall.
This pain. He'd endured it earlier today. It came from Grace.
Her firewall prevented him from contacting her — directly, anyway. He must try the indirect route, via emotion.
Grace had teased him into an outburst earlier, because she recognized his worst weakness. The inability to express his feelings. The irony of emotions being his only psychic path to he
r might've given him a laugh under other circumstances. But in this moment, afflicted with her suffering, he found no humor in it.
"Are you ill?"
David jumped away from the wall. He'd forgotten about his cellmate.
His new friend sat unmoving, turning only his spooky eyes to keep track of David. The man did not watch with wide eyes, however, but with a curious gaze. His mouth held a neutral position, not a smile but not a frown either. With his back to the wall, angled into the corner, he had his knees bent in front of him and his forearms resting on his knees with his hands dangling. The man appeared relaxed, yet David sensed a tension beneath the surface, coiled within the man's core like a serpent that might spring out to attack at any moment.
If his cellmate morphed into a werewolf, even that wouldn't stop him from what he needed to do.
"I'm fine," he muttered, to satisfy the other man.
Then he fixated his gaze on the far wall, unleashed his mind from his body and soared up into the crossroads. No traveling this time. He dragged in as much energy as he could withstand, consolidated every drop of passion and longing and adoration for Grace he possessed, and fired the missile down at her wall.
The projectile splintered.
White-hot shards punctured his mind, and he slapped his palms on the wall, swallowing a cry. Force wasn't the way, he should've remembered it from the first time he tried to contact her after she raised her defenses. When he'd shared himself with her before leaving the house, it had been more subtle, more intimate. The fact she'd been in his arms then, completely open to him in body and mind, must've eased the way.
He tried again. This time, he avoided the crossroads and stayed in his body. Instead of attacking her wall, he concentrated on sending her another gift, wrapped in the intensity of his love and concern for her. A single message, conveyed in emotion.
I'm okay.
It slid through, he felt it. Her fear, her pain, it melted away in the heat of his message. She was asleep, he sensed, yet she relaxed out of the torment.
"You don't look fine," his cellmate said.
David pulled himself up straight and forced a smile. "I'm good. Why should you care? We're strangers."
"The smell of decaying flesh bothers me. I'd prefer you don't die until the guards return."
"I'll keep that in mind."
David shuffled into the corner opposite the man. He seated himself at a forty-five-degree angle to the room, mimicking his cellmate's position. David stretched one leg out in front of him and bent the other so he could rest one arm atop his knee. The other arm he let hang down, with his hand on his thigh. He too could feign relaxation.
David nodded at his new friend. "I've never had a roommate before. Not sure what the etiquette is." He leaned his head back against the wall. "My name is David Ransom. What's yours?"
The man stared at him for several seconds, the whites of his eyes gleaming. Then he let out a small sigh and, in an accented voice, he said, "I am Nkosi Uba."
"Where are you from?"
"South Africa. Johannesburg, originally."
"I'm from Wisconsin." The words tasted strange. He hadn't spoken of his home in years. Though he'd told Grace about his childhood, those conversations happened during the eight months she no longer remembered. So essentially, he hadn't mentioned his home to anyone in a very long time.
Nkosi studied him in silence.
"Wisconsin is in the United States," David said. "It's north of — "
"I know where it is."
David shifted position, his pants scritching on the concrete floor as moved out of the corner to lean against the flat wall. "How long have you been a guest in this luxurious resort?"
A trace of a smile played across Nkosi's face, bit it faded swiftly. "I have been here for two months. I know this only because my watch tells me the date. Otherwise, I would have no answer for your question."
"They don't mind cruel and unusual punishment at these places. I imagine you haven't seen the outdoors in two months either."
"I have not — except for a blade of grass that fell off of a guard's boot."
David grunted. "I'm sure they believe that counts as seeing the outdoors."
Nkosi watched David intently, as if measuring up the man before him, and David wasn't quite sure if Nkosi liked the result.
"If they have sent you," Nkosi said, "to befriend me in hopes I will give them what they want, then you may inform them it will not work."
"Why would my befriending you get them what they want?"
"It is their way. It didn't work the four times previously, and it will not work this time either. If they burn you, I will not give in. If they slowly cut off your hand, still I will not give in. If they — "
"I get the idea." David felt a lump hardening in his stomach, like a meal he'd eaten too fast. He knew Tesler salivated at the prospect of torturing psychics, but this was the first he'd heard of burning or cutting off hands. Tesler favored cleaner methods that involved no messy fluids, other than tears. Seeing people cry and listening to them beg for mercy, that was Tesler's pleasure.
"Does your arm hurt?" Nkosi asked.
"What?"
Nkosi waved at David's left arm. "You've been rubbing it as if it hurts."
David glanced down and saw he was rubbing his arm. Old habits, he supposed. The bruise may have healed, but the memory lingered. He'd been strapped to a less-pleasant version of a dentist chair, veins combusting with a novel mixture of drugs meant to boost psychic powers and render the subject compliant. Tesler hunched before him, expressionless except for the glittering in his dark eyes.
"Who is Janet Austen?" Tesler demanded.
He slanted over David with one hand on each arm of the chair, pinning his already restrained arms to the chair. The pressure of Tesler's grasp triggered a dull aching in his arms that spread down into hands. David winced, but said nothing.
Tesler pressed down harder. David gritted his jaw so hard he thought his teeth might shatter. He would never tell this man what he wanted to know. Never.
"I know it's an alias," Tesler said. "Tell me Janet Austen's real name and the pain will stop."
Grace. Her name flitted through his mind, soft as a breeze. Beautiful Grace. Sweet Grace. His gut wrenched. He couldn't betray her even when his own life depended on it.
"Have it your way." Tesler stepped back, releasing the pressure on David's arms. A sigh rushed out of him unbidden, like the release of air when a vacuum-sealed container was torn open.
Tesler nodded to one of the guards posted near the door. The man strode over to David's chair and unhooked a billy club from his belt, which he offered to Tesler. The scientist took the club, slapping it on his palm.
"Tell me," Tesler said.
David shook his head.
Tesler slammed the club down on David's forearm. He stifled a cry as pain shot through his arm, into his hand, convulsing the tendons. The agony seared his muscles, rushing through his body in a wave that annihilated his thoughts. His ears rang. Darkness licked at the edges of his vision.
Kill me. The thought came from nowhere, it seemed. He didn't want to die, and yet he did not want to betray Grace, not even accidentally.
Tesler studied David with a look of detached interest. He might as well have been observing a baboon in a cage.
"I don't know who she is," David said.
Tesler pursed his lips, thumping the club on his palm. After a couple seconds, he shrugged and tossed the club to the guard. "Ah well, perhaps the drugs will work better. You may have masochistic tendencies, after all."
Then the scientist had left the room.
"How did it happen?" Nkosi's voice broke David out of the past. "Your arm. How did you injure it?"
"Wrestling with a snake."
Grace compared his mission with wrestling an alligator. She was ri
ght, his foolishness had whipped around to bite him in the ass.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, but the stain of guilt was embedded too deep to wipe off so easily. If Tesler captured Grace, he'd get answers from her no matter what it took. If she denied him, he might even overcome his aversion to messes and unlock fresh, more agonizing methods of convincing her to cooperate.
All because of me.
"Now you seem angry," Nkosi said. "You must have troublesome memories."
"Troublesome." David laughed, though not with amusement. To his own ears, the laughter sounded harsh and bitter. "You could say that."
Nkosi's eyes narrowed. His lips flattened.
Metaphysical energy tickled at his brain. He winced. Nkosi was attempting to touch his mind without his consent. Only Grace had permission to poke him this way, though from her, it came through with subtle, nearly sensual tenderness. He batted away the mental feather irritating him.
Of course, if Nkosi resolved to get inside David's head, he could batter down the gates without much effort. Every human mind boasted a built-in barrier, not quite a wall, but more of a curtain. Grace's firewall, erected with conscious purpose, blocked out everything. The natural curtain impeded curious travelers. Anyone with a serious interest in mind reading could rip away the veil with little expenditure of energy.
Nkosi prodded him once more.
"Are you sure you want to do that?" David asked. "Maybe you enjoy the occasional psychotic break, but I prefer sanity."
"The risk is only to me."
"I still don't want you ransacking my brain." David relaxed against the wall. "Besides, I don't care to have a lunatic for a roommate. I'd rather not have to clean up after you when you lose control of your bowels."
Nkosi arched an eyebrow. "I thought it was speculation that mind reading caused such dire side effects. You've seen the results before?"
"Yes." David met Nkosi's gaze. "Trust me, you don't want to risk it."
Nkosi squinted for a couple seconds, then nodded. "I have decided to trust you."
"Thanks." David supposed he should feel grateful, but he hadn't decided yet whether he trusted Nkosi. The man might be a plant, using the very techniques he claimed their captors used on him with his previous cellmates. David couldn't know for sure.