He was standing in the center of the cell now, close to panic, certain he could feel the first of the reptiles on his feet. He wanted to scream, was certain he would scream at the first touch of scaly skin on his toes. Abruptly, in his mind the picture of the snakes at his feet was replaced with the stern face of his teacher, Rodyn’s thin rattan cane raised to deliver a stinging blow. He almost flinched at the realistic image. He blinked. The snakes were gone.
Was Rodyn helping him? Or had his mind provided the image to banish the psi attack? He took a breath, fighting for control over the outward signs of his fear. Of course there were no snakes in the cell! That was ridicu—
He blinked again—and scrambled backward into the corner of the tiny room. A roar shattered the very air, cracking the stone beneath his feet and shaking a fall of dust from the ceiling. The creature trapped in the cell with him had sprung from a nightmare. Its hunched shoulders scraped the ceiling, its four legs were as big around as tree trunks and tipped in six-inch razor-sharp claws that clattered against the stone as it paced. Its jaws gaped wide with each thunderous roar to reveal row after row of yellow fangs, and its eyes glowed red as it studied him with intelligence.
He shook with terror, even though he knew in some part of his mind that the monster could not be real. The monster looked real. It sounded real. It even smelled real, its hot breath like the overflow of open sewers, but he knew, he knew, it could not be real. It took all the courage he had to close his eyes and summon the image of Rodyn and his cane again, but he managed it. He used the image to beat back the false reality of the monster sharing the cell with him, wielded it like a shield to clear a lucid space in his mind free of the interference of outside influence. Around that calm space he built a wall, tall and strong.
And when he opened his eyes again, the monster was gone.
There were other “visitors” that night, but he recognized them all for what they were. When the door to the cell swung open hours later, he was sitting quietly in the center of the floor, waiting.
Rodyn looked at him with something that might have been a smile. “You found nothing to disturb you during the night, boy?”
“No, Master.” He rose to his feet.
His teacher’s eyes narrowed, observing him in the flickering light of the lantern he’d brought. He handed him a robe.
“You’re not cold?”
“No, Master.” He slipped the robe over his head. “I built a fire.”
In his mind, the merry flames still burned, illuminating the cozy room.
Lana jerked wide awake in the passenger seat of the rented SUV and sucked in a breath. Her heart was threatening to jump out of her chest, beating at about twice its normal rate while she struggled to reconcile the bright sunshine of the Oklahoma countryside outside the car window with the dark vision she’d just experienced.
Gabriel took his eyes off the road to glance at her in concern. “Are you okay?”
“Shit, no.” She sat up and dragged both hands down her face. Then she turned to stare at Gabriel, unable to look away from those lines around his mouth that hinted at cruel determination until he smiled, at the shadows in his eyes that were the only sign of the pain he concealed so well, at the set of his shoulders, the strength of his hands. She saw everything about him differently now because she’d seen that little boy battling the monsters they’d sent to invade his mind. God knows she hadn’t wanted to. Damn him!
“What is it?” She could tell by his voice that he knew. He was waiting for her to tell him.
“Who was Rodyn?”
His eyes flicked in her direction. “He was my teacher. I trained under him from the age of ten until I was 17.”
“Trained. For your psi talents.”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t just born with them?”
“I was born with potential, Lana. How that potential was exploited, for good or for evil, with control or without it, depended on my training.”
She snorted. “We see how well that worked out.”
His jaw tightened along with his hands on the steering wheel. “A loss of control on the order I experienced with you while I was in training would have marked me for immediate termination.”
“Termination. You mean from training.”
“I mean from life. The people who ordered my training in the first place distrust those with psi talents. For good reason. Without proper training and self-control, a person with a high level of psi talent is dangerous to those who have none. Even with the training and control the mandates require, some still choose to use their talents in all the wrong ways.”
“Like the ones chasing Asia and Jack.”
“Yes. Exactly like them.”
Blood on the floor, spreading in a wine-red pool. The women screaming . . . Lana shook her head, trying to clear it of the shattering image.
“You have history with them,” she whispered. “This is personal for you.”
His expression revealed nothing.
A rush of untamed anger ran through her before she could catch it. Nothing seemed within her control any more, least of all her emotions.
“What is it about these men—Kinnian . . . and Trevyn, right? Why can’t you just stop all the lies and tell me?”
“Yes, I have a history with them.” His voice lacked any inflection that would have allowed her to interpret meaning from the words. “But it’s also true that I took this case as a favor to Sam and Rayna. As for lying, it’s going to be damn hard for me to do that from now on. Though I’m not sure you’ll see that as a good thing.”
Her temper flared, as hot as he was cool. She was furious, the rage she’d felt at his violation of her mind the night before compounded by the confusion she felt now as the bits and pieces of his life forced their way to the forefront of her awareness despite her best efforts to suppress them.
“Goddamn it, Gabriel! I didn’t want any of this! You could have kept all of your secrets, but now I have all of this . . . this”—her hands waved in the vicinity of her head—“secret society, psychic cult shit in my brain, and I can’t make any sense of it! I feel like I’m losing my mind!”
He started to reach out to her, but aborted the movement when he caught the warning in her expression. He let out a frustrated breath and returned his hand to the steering wheel.
“Alana, I know this isn’t easy. Nothing I say will make it any easier for you. If I had wanted to keep any secrets from you, it would be impossible now. And, believe me, most things about my life would have been best kept to myself. I no longer have that choice, nor do you. I’m an intimate part of your mind now, just as you’re a part of mine.” He glanced her way, his expression grim. “You can’t wall off that part of you, any more than you could block out your own memories or feelings. Even less, since your natural curiosity will want to explore what’s there, and you have no remembered emotional trauma of your own to keep you from doing so.”
She didn’t need to have her own emotional trauma attached to those memories. She could feel enough of his to keep her from wanting to investigate what she’d acquired from him. Every glimpse of what his life had been only frightened her more. Every fragment of memory only served to increase her confusion about who, or what, Gabriel Cruz truly was.
Lana ran both hands through her hair with an exasperated sigh, releasing her unruly curls from any semblance of Bureau-mandated control. “That’s just the thing, Gabriel,” she said at last. “Maybe if I’d had some time to get to know you before this happened. You know, the usual way. I ask. You answer. I tell you a little story about how I got in trouble in fourth grade. You tell me how you like your steak. But this . . . I just don’t know if I can handle this. It’s too much.”
He nodded, his eyes on the road. “I know.”
All at once she felt as if her heart was breaking. A tear, sudden and inexplicable, rolled down her cheek. In the silence, her thoughts echoed.
My God, Gabriel, you were just a little boy. “Shit.” She swiped
at her face with shaking hands.
“Lana.” He had a warm hand on her shoulder before she could stop him. Part of her ached to lean into that touch, but she hadn’t listened to that part of herself in a long, long time.
She shrugged him off. “Leave me alone, Gabriel. Just . . . for God’s sake.” She turned toward the window and huddled in on the pain. “Leave me alone.”
How could she cry for him? She had hidden it, was hiding it even now, but he’d seen.
God knew she had every right to cry for herself. For the senseless act of violence that took her mother—and the only family she’d ever known—when she was nine. For the horrors she’d endured in the succession of foster homes that followed. For the salvation of kindness she’d found in the last of them that had meant she would survive after all.
Anger and a kind of fierce protectiveness burned in Gabriel’s chest for her. He had long ago acclimated himself to the emotional content of his memories. They no longer had the power to affect him. But he cursed himself for the moment of weakness that had brought Lana to this. How was it that a woman so strong she had overcome what he saw in her own mind could be so vulnerable she would weep for what she saw in his?
God help him, he didn’t know what to do with the feelings she called up in him—the tenderness, the possessiveness, the ache of desire. He could feel the link between their minds seeking to reestablish itself, tendrils of pre-thought and connection reaching out from the deepest, least conscious part of his mind to hers. His autonomic nervous system slid into synch with hers, aligning their heartbeats, their breathing patterns, making allowances for their difference in size and genetic structure and still finding a compatible rhythm. Gabriel’s heart sped up as he recognized what was happening.
He set it aside. What he thought he felt was impossible. It was just another of his body’s reactions to being near her—like the erection he couldn’t seem to lose.
He stole a glance at the remarkable woman who had shared his bed not 12 hours ago. He dared to reach for her soft curls; now that she was sleeping, she wouldn’t reject his touch. She had forced herself to sleep, rather than give in to the emotions she felt. For him. In her heart she could not forgive his betrayal. She would never allow him close enough to hurt her again.
And though it broke him body and soul to admit it, Gabriel had to agree that was probably for the best.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Trin, Minertsa, Sector 10
The usual light lavender of Ardis’s aura was shot through with magenta and deep red. Here in the hidden recesses of the Public Records Archive, Collections Building II, there were no other researchers at this time of the solar cycle to see the depths of her anger. There were no monitoring devices covering this angle of the room to record the breadth of her outrage. She could give free vent to her emotions for the time she was here, something she could not do even in her home, which she knew had been monitored for some time, probably since she’d started working with Sennik, certainly since she’d started having sex with him.
The sex, of course, was one reason for her anger. And her shame. Though she had planned for it, though she had encouraged it, though, indeed, everything depended on it, still she flushed bright orange when she thought of what she did with Sennik. Her body and mind responded to his manipulation as they were programmed by nature to do, and the pleasure was wild, indescribable, world-shattering. She left him every time shaking with the aftermath, barely able to function, aching for more.
Hating him with all of her being. Hating herself even more.
When this was all over, if, indeed, she lived to see it through, there would be a reckoning. Of this Ardis was certain. Her aura grew dark and glowering with that knowledge.
She returned her attention to the compscreen and the black of her aura was once again underlit with the dark red of her rage, pierced with occasional white-hot flashes of shock at Sennik’s audacity. There on the screen was the data she had paid such a dear price to gain. She had bartered her self-respect in hopes of learning the access codes to Sennik’s personal data files. In the previous solar cycle she had snagged the last of them from his mind. And in those data files she found the blueprint for destruction she knew the Director Prime had drawn with his own hand.
Fifty-six human adults. Twenty young ones. Specially trained and placed in positions of strategic importance throughout the Minertsan Consortium. A series of events, coordinated not through Sennik or anyone connected to him, but through an innocent-looking human boy, trained and encoded to function as a bioserver, relaying instructions on a precise timetable via telepathic connections. Assassinations, staged riots, sabotage of key facilities—apparently random acts of terrorism and murder. At the end of three solar cycles, the prominent voices in favor of opening the Consortium to outside influences would be silenced. Those who had dared to suggest an alternative to slave labor in the Consortium would be dead or blamed for the deaths of others, their businesses in ruin. The markets would be in chaos, reeling from the loss of crucial manufacturing and mining centers. Fear would rule the populace. The people would demand a change in leadership, a swing of the pendulum toward more control.
Sennik would be ready. And once he had restored control over the Consortium as Chief Oligarch, there would be no power in the galaxy that could stop him from taking whatever else he wanted.
What had happened on Zalin had been a test, Ardis realized. Sennik’s happy mood afterward was ample proof of the success of that test. But he needed the boy for the rest of it. Until the boy was found, Ardis had time to do what could be done.
Still, that was so little! Exposing the plan was not enough. Ardis had no proof, beyond the files on the screen in front of her, files that could very easily have been fabricated. Sennik was a powerful being, with powerful allies. She was a minor administrator, and an investigation would reveal both her affair with Sennik and a very personal grudge against him.
Her only hope was with the humans, whose path had begun to merge with hers in the time of her mourning. Slindar had always said the humans pointed the way to the future. My beloved Slindar. Little had he known his own fate, and hers, would be so intimately intertwined with the humans’. . .
“I’m so sorry,” the human had said, his facial expressions showing sadness, regret. She understood they had no auras to show such things. “There was so much fighting. We couldn’t get through to the children. Slindar found a way through a back corridor and let us in, but he was killed before we could get out of there. We had to leave him behind.”
“It is better that it happened that way.” Her own aura was the dark purple of a fresh bruise. “He was seen as a hero for defending the facility.”
The human—his name was Sam—nodded. “He was a hero, Ardis. Those children should grow up remembering his name.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I hope they forget everything about that place.”
Slindar’s death at Del Origa VII had propelled her on this journey. And now she would pass the torch to the humans traveling with her, to do what they could do to avert this looming disaster. A very few of the Minertsan targets were sympathizers. They could be warned to neutralize the human threats working for them. In some cases, the abolitionist organization Rescue might be able to extract the humans from their posts. But they were all racing against time. Kinnian and Trevyn Dar were hunters of a deadly and efficient reputation. They would have the boy soon. Once the child was in Sennik’s hands, the Director Prime would waste no more time on preliminaries. He would set his plan in motion. And worlds would fall.
His mouth slanted hard across hers, his kiss hot and demanding. Beneath her his hips lifted in unyielding rhythm. His hands, tight on her waist, gripped her as if she would escape him. She moaned, caught between pleasure and pain.
“Ethan.” She tried to slow him down, her breath coming in gasps.
“You can’t leave me, Asia. I won’t let you go.”
The rough slide of his shaft in the slick heat of her
core fed a flame that threatened to burn her to cinders. “I could never leave you. You mean everything to me. Jesus, Ethan.” She burned, God! she burned, as he filled her and withdrew, over and over. He made her lose her mind, forgetting everything except the feel of him deep inside, pushing her closer and closer to the edge.
Without warning he rolled her onto her back and hovered over her, motionless. He hadn’t left her; he was still inside her, hard, throbbing, but unmoving. She arched into him—close, so close.
“Ethan, please, God, don’t stop.”
“Tell me.” His face was wet with tears, his eyes shadowed with torment. “Tell me, Asia. I have to know.”
“I don’t . . .” She breathed, barely able to think, “I don’t know what you want. I don’t know how to help you.” He seemed so sad, so desperate, but they had been too long without each other, and this need would not be denied.
He groaned and surged forward, igniting the firestorm that had been smoldering in her body. She came with him, perception shattering as she clung to him, the memory of his tortured voice following her into consciousness: “Where are you, Asia? Tell me where you are!”
“Ethan!” She woke, gasping, shuddering with the shock of intense orgasm, alone in the dark and a heat so oppressive she could hardly move under the weight of it. She groaned and curled up on herself on the floor of the moving truck, the sense of loss immediate and piercing, squeezing her breath from her chest. She wrapped her arms around her waist, rocking with pain. She could still smell him, still taste him on her tongue, still feel the power of his climax, even as she felt his helpless need.
“Damn it, Ethan,” she sobbed. “If I only knew . . .”
Asia rolled to her knees—and added dizzy nausea to the list of crazy, conflicting signals from her overwrought body. Stiff, aching muscles. Pounding head. A thirst so profound she felt it cell-deep. Drugs. She had been out for who knew how long—hours, at least. Maybe as much as a full day.
Trouble In Mind (Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2) Page 20