“Yes. Minton. He is here on Earth. Near where we were.”
She laughed. “He is not.”
“You sensed him. I sensed him. He was searching, not for you, but for your brother.” He set the amplifier in the broad beam of sunlight slicing low through the door, where it would gather power. “Both must be here. On Earth.” His dark gaze narrowed. “I will find them, Zenna. And when I do, they will die. Unless you send them back.”
She kept her tone cool, amused. “Unless my brother finds us first. At which time, he will kill you both, and me, too.”
She perched one hip on the edge of the table, hoping Rankin would fail to notice her shadow lying across the amplifier’s absorption cells. It wouldn’t stop the regeneration, but it would retard it. Full-strength sunlight was by far the best. The angle of the rays told her darkness would fall soon. The longer regeneration took, the more chance Jon would have to contact Minton—or Minton to contact Jon without Rankin’s enhanced senses detecting them.
“Really, Rankin, your naiveté amuses me. What we heard was nothing more than an echo. You will recall, we translated through the trailing edge of a solar storm. If you had put your moderate intelligence to more legitimate and less criminal usage in your youth, you would know, as do most people who study even elementary science, that such storms bounce signals through both space and time. Perhaps my former bond-mate was calling to my brother from elsewhere...or elsewhen, and because I am, naturally, receptive to both their signatures, I heard them. With the aid of the amplifier, so did you.
“But,” she continued, leaning toward him to keep her shadow over the receptors, “to assume that they are on Earth is to show your great ignorance of the facts. Not, of course, that I should expect better of you.” Her scathing tone tightened his face. In reality, Rankin had a fine, sharp—but badly misused—intelligence. It pleased her, though, to keep him angry with her by denigrating it whenever a chance arose. Angry, he tended not to think as clearly as he might otherwise.
“Let me explain in terms you might be capable of comprehending, patán.” She spat the last word at him, leaving no doubt that she meant it as an slur on his intellectual abilities. His mouth tightened and his fists clenched, but she ignored those symptoms of his rage. Here and now, with the amplifier out of commission, he was helpless against her superior powers.
“When an Octad is translating—as my birth-mate’s must—without the mechanism you force me to employ, much energy is concentrated by those eight minds. When that energy is caught in a vortex, it is swirled around and can be cast out in many directions, not merely the direction it is aimed. Translation is not what you might call an exact science. That is why it takes a full Octad to translate between the links of space and time to achieve a certain objective—such as a window to Earth, in this time-frame.
“The window through which we translated is narrow and ragged. No one of any sense would attempt to translate through it without the amplifier. Not if they expected to live.”
Rankin’s small eyes narrowed even further in suspicion. “What was to stop your mate reconstructing your experiments? He may have an amplifier now.”
She laughed. “No, Rankin. Your own fears render you paranoid as well as foolish. Minton knows as well as I do how unsuccessful my experiments were. He recognized before I did the instability of the invention. That is the reason he and I parted on such poor terms. I chose to believe in the validity of my own work. He chose not to.”
She narrowed her eyes and twisted her lips in a show of scornful ire toward her husband. “He also chose to report what he saw—rightly, it turns out—as my failure, in order to stop me taking what he considered unacceptable risks. Yet, despite its having been a failure, at least scientifically, I cannot, will not, forgive Minton for what he did. Thanks to him, my permission to continue my studies was withdrawn before I had a chance to perfect the device.”
She shrugged as if none of this was of great importance to her now. “Nor will he forgive me for refusing to believe him. We may have been bond-mated, but we were also competitors in our field. Bitter competitors, it turned out. Our espousal was terminated the moment he saw fit to denounce me. So if you think he’ll come searching for me, you are wrong.”
She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “My brother, of course, is a different matter. Trust me on this. When there is a window adequate for him to bring an Octad through to Earth, he will do so, and his purpose will be our deaths. Mine. B’tar’s. Yours.”
“There won’t be another of those for ten years,” Rankin said, clearly gloating. “So you rattle nothing more than empty threats, woman.”
She smiled. “The Federation does not forget criminal activity, patán, nor does it forgive, so what I tell you is not a threat, but a promise. And I will do nothing to try to prevent or forestall that death. I would rather be dead than continue to assist you in your efforts to maim other civilizations with your poison.”
“If you die, your child will die. I, personally, will see to that.”
“You will not have a chance to do that,” she said evenly.
“Oh?” He sneered. “You plan to do it yourself? If that were the case, you would have done it long since.”
Zenna held her tongue still and her thoughts severely cloaked. Somehow, she would, through sheer strength of will, send Glesta to The Other before the moment of her own death came. The Other...whom she had found by accident, while carefully seeking another Aazoni mind. Any other Aazoni mind. It was a weak presence, and untrained, but receptive both to her and to Glesta. The Other, Zenna knew, longed for a child and she ruthlessly used that longing to create in The Other the perfect foster-mother for her daughter should one become necessary.
She shivered. With Jon on Earth, however unexpectedly, however impossible it might seem, that time could be much sooner than she had anticipated.
Chapter Five
LENORE. SHE WASN’T SURE if it was a spoken word or an echo of something from her memory, another whisper on the wind.
Lenore! It came again and she turned her head, gasping at the sight of Jon. He was there! Really there. Beside her. As in the dream, bronzed, lying in a golden glow that emanated from him or maybe from his strange necklace. He lay naked, injured. And large. He was larger than life, larger than she’d dreamed. He must, standing, be six-and-a-half feet tall. His shoulders, sleek and exquisitely muscled, were broadest she’d seen. And his legs...
She drew a deep breath, held it, bit her lip, felt the sting of her teeth penetrating the skin, tasted the coppery taint of blood.
Which was the dream? Which was reality? What she saw now? Or was it the empty cave?
Tentatively, she stretched out a hand to touch him.
Her fingers met with a hard-muscled shoulder. His skin was resilient, the form it sheathed, solid. He was real enough.
But cold, terribly cold. She slipped off her floatpad rose up on her knees over him. Oh, Lord, was he dead?
No. His chest still moved up and down slowly as he breathed. As if in response to her touch, he rolled his head toward her, revealing a scalp gash crusted with blood. He moaned. His bent leg was swelled even worse than it had been in her dream, the skin hard and shiny from ankle to knee except where the unnatural whiteness of a broken bone protruded through an ugly wound halfway up his calf. His foot still stuck out at an unnatural angle.
Lenore stared at him. Where in the hell had he come from? What’s more, where in hell had he been? Or was there something wrong with her eyes, as well as with her head? She blinked them, squeezed them shut, then opened them again. He was still there.
She slid forward and stepped off the ledge, circling in front of him. With gentle fingers, touched his leg just above the ankle, felt, in contrast to the clammy cold of the rest of his flesh, a terrible heat of infection pulsating from it. He winced and emitted a soft moan. He must be real if he could feel pain.
She flicked a glance at his face. His lashes, long, dark, with tips of gold, fluttered on the
taut skin under his eyes, but did not open. She remembered the blood that she’d seen in the dream seeping from under his side. It was still there, a dark stain but dry, she realized, touching it, glad not to have to risk rolling him over to examine the injury from which it had issued.
A wisp of wind, resin-laden with the scent of evergreens, wafted in, chilling the sudden beads of sweat on her face.
Goose bumps dotted the man’s skin. He needed treatment, and he needed it fast. But there was no way, no way on earth she could move someone of his mass. Still, she had to do something for him. He must be near the point of hypothermia, if not already in its clutches, in the cool, dry air of the cave. Hypothermia. Shock. She tried to review what she’d learned of outdoor survival with the various hiking groups she’d belonged to over the years. None of it seemed adequate now.
She fumbled with the Velcro at the base of her pack, dragged her sleeping bag out of its case, opened it and gently spread it over him, careful not to let it touch his injured leg. She considered trying to move him onto her floatpad, but knew it wasn’t feasible. Still, the warmth of the bag should help. She turned its control to high.
He murmured something, tried again to open his eyes and then sank back into what appeared to be unconsciousness. She pulled a small stove from her pack, activated its cell and set it on the floor of the cave just below their ledge, hoping the heat would rise and envelop him.
With shaking hands, she opened her first aid kit and withdrew a packet containing a pad saturated with antiseptic. She cleaned her hands with the first one, opened another and bent toward his head.
He stirred and shifted, moaned as the wet cleansing tissue touched the open wound. “Shh,” she said, carefully flicking out flakes of grit. “Lie still. Let me help you.”
She finished cleaning his wound and the thick hair surrounding it, considered wrapping a bandage around his head, but decided against it. Better to let the air get at the gash, though it must be kept clean. After stuffing a heavy sweatshirt into her sleeping bag case, she carefully slid one hand beneath his head. As she lifted him, she felt the silky thickness of his hair against her palm, flowing over her wrist. She slipped the makeshift pillow under his head, smoothing it on the rock before lowering him onto it.
Her first-aid kit was only a basic one, with no inflatable splints, which meant she would need to cut sticks to immobilize his leg before she lifted it onto the ledge, she decided, but in the meantime, as long as he remained unconscious, he wasn’t moving it. It could wait until daylight, as would her trip out for help.
Suddenly, he made another sound and her gaze flew back to his face. He parted his lips; his tongue came out as if to try to moisten them, then his head lolled to one side again. Of course, he must be thirsty. How long could the human body last without water? Could she wake him enough to get him to take some?
How long had he been in the cave? she wondered as she rummaged to the bottom of her pack, finding a stack of small, light cooking pots. She took the largest one, scrambled from the cave and filled it from the bubbling spring. She’d had the first dream four nights earlier, she reasoned, entering the cave again, so if he had been responsible for what was happening in her head, he had been there at least that long.
After clipping its detachable handle to it, she set the pot on top of her heater, not wanting to further shock his system with the glacially cold water.
She gazed at his face. It was probably the most perfect, the most beautiful male face she had ever seen and...she stared, leaned closer, looking harder. If he had been there for four days, where was his beard? He was certainly old enough to have one. Twenty-five, she thought, maybe as much as twenty-seven. At the very least a full decade younger than she.
Disappointment tasted bitter on the back of her tongue as she recognized the difference in their ages. Whatever promise she might have imagined, he was not for her. He would never be for her.
Young men wanted younger women. Men her age wanted younger women, too. Hell, let’s face it, a man twice her age would prefer a woman half of it.
Some elemental part of her railed against such injustice. He was hers. She had found him. Didn’t that give her some rights?
No. Of course not.
Besides, he could...She looked at him again. Hell, he could have any woman he wanted, any time, anywhere, and for a certainty, what he wanted wouldn’t be a half-dried-up accountant pushing thirty-eight. Not even one with a rich father, and it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out pretty quickly that her rich father was too mean and ornery to die any time soon, so any expectations of her ever inheriting his wealth were damn slim anyway.
His jaw was square, his brows straight but for a slight lift in the center, a shade or two darker than his hair. His nose sculpted a strong line down the center of his face, and his chin held a jut of determination even in his sleep. He emanated power, a presence that would fill any room, any house. His male potency was unmistakable despite the delicacy of the strange necklace he wore.
But it was his skin that fascinated her. It glowed that wonderful, bronze tone she had dreamed about. Clenching her lip between her teeth, she ventured to touch his shoulder, sliding the thin silver sleeping bag down several inches to expose more muscles, flat, dark nipples, running an exploring hand over him. She told herself, recognizing the lie, that she was only checking his temperature. He was appreciably warmer now.
As was the water, she learned when she jerked away from the strong temptation to further explore his skin. He was unconscious, for heaven’s sake! There was a name for people who did things like that.
She stirred the water with one finger, then, soaking the corner of a bandage from the first aid kit, she held it against his lips, squeezing gently. To her gratification, his mouth opened and she managed to trickle several more drops onto his tongue.
She dipped and squeezed and dripped, watching his throat work as he swallowed. She gave him more, and this time, he sucked greedily on the cloth. He had consumed perhaps a quarter of a cup before she remembered that if he had internal injuries, giving him water might have been the worst thing to do.
It was not.
She stared at him. Had he spoken? Had he said that? No. He slept on, or remained unconscious.
Telepathy. The word popped into her head, as loud and as clear as the denial she’d just heard. On its tail hung fear. She squared her shoulders, trying to calm her whirling thoughts. She did not believe in telepathy any more than she believed in ghosts. Every pore of her being rejected the notion. It just wasn’t possible!
Dammit, who was he? she asked herself. Where had he come from? Why was he there? Even more to the point, how, exactly, had he gotten there?
The thoughts whirled through her mind, answers, each more bizarre, tumbling in after them. Trying to keep them at bay, she went back outside to gather firewood, knowing she had to get more heat into the cave before she left him and hiked out for assistance.
What if he was a skydiver whose chute hadn’t opened fully, letting him fall to the ground through the trees? she speculated as she broke brittle, dead limbs off tree-trunks. His clothing could have been destroyed in the fall, couldn’t it? He could, she supposed, have crawled into the cave.
With a compound fracture in his leg? Up those high, stacked slabs of rock that formed the three irregular stairs? No. Not a chance. Besides, assuming he had fallen through the trees, they wouldn’t have totally destroyed even the cheapest jumpsuit on the market. There would have been tatters on him. If nothing else, today’s fabrics—even so-called disposables—were tough, which was why environmentalists hated them. They didn’t degrade for decades.
With a large armload of firewood gleaned from the forest, she made her way back. Maybe there was a secret nudist colony somewhere in the mountains and he’d wandered away, fallen, hurt himself and...right, crawled into the cave trailing his broken leg all the way up those slabs of rock. Sure he had.
She crouched beside the spot she and Caroline had discovered, on s
ubsequent visits to the cave, made the best place for a campfire, and set down her bundle of sticks.
There had to be a better explanation for his naked presence. Hadn’t she read somewhere recently about a photographer who inveigled his friends into stripping off their clothing, donning climbing gear and striking poses on sheer rock faces? The photographs were then turned into postcards, which reportedly sold faster than they could be printed. Tourists, it seemed, loved them for reasons perhaps best understood by a mind on vacation.
Was Jon one of those weird exhibitionists who volunteered to strip down and climb rocks, she wondered, glancing at his sleeping bag–shrouded form. She broke tiny twigs into little bits, laid them on top of a pad of dried moss and grass, and struck a sparker. If so, where was the photographer? And where was Jon’s climbing gear? The article she’d read had carried pictures of groups of men and women incongruously looped with ropes around their bare middles, coils dangling from their naked shoulders, some with rope slings bisecting their buttocks like hefty G-strings.
She blew gently on the tiny flame as it licked up through the tufts of brown grass, catching in the twiglets, snapping and crackling. Carefully, she set larger branches around the small fire, watching them catch, grimacing at the rapidity with which they were consumed. She’d soon have to go out for more wood. She thought longingly of the poplar she’d split and left in an untidy heap by the chopping block. What she wouldn’t do to have a big pile of that right next to the ledge. It would warm the cave nicely and burning it would be a lot more fun than stacking it when she got home again.
She glanced at the man on the ledge. If he’d fallen and hurt himself and they’d put him there while they went for help, surely they’d have dressed him first, or at the very least, covered him! And they would have, if they’d had any sense at all, done just what she’d done, collected wood and tinder and started a fire to keep him warm.
Even assuming he’d had friends to do just that, the only trace of a fire was what she and Caroline had left.
Whispers on the Wind Page 6