**I don’t see any sleeping rolls or cooking equipment,** she telepathed to Valiant.
He jumped. A clump of leaves avalanched off him. Luckily, the scrape of equipment and mutters ahead of them covered the sound, and the men were looking in the other direction.
**Christ!** Valiant stared at her. **A telepath.**
**They don’t seem like they’re setting up camp. Does that mean this is temporary? They’ll leave eventually?**
Valiant’s mouth opened and closed. **I’ve teamed with telepaths enough to know how it works: I talk to myself as loudly as I can, and you pick it up if you’re listening, right?** His attention returned to the men. **Oui, that’s a listening post. Doesn’t look permanent. I estimate fifteen minutes to a half hour. They’ll hear what they can hear and then head on. We’ll move off then.**
So they lay and waited. And waited. The two mercs put on headphones. Then they silently aimed the dish into the forest and checked their instruments. Every minute or so they’d turn the dish slightly.
Out of the corner of her straight-ahead view Lina watched a beetle make a tour of Valiant’s face, just to disappear into his hair. The hero never moved anything other than his eyes, trying to track it as it crossed his nose.
Then it was her turn. Something crawled very slowly across her back. She scrunched her muscles so she wouldn’t shudder. Think about something else. Anything. Nice little bug. He wouldn’t bite her, would he?
She took a step back from the real world, then another one just for more distance. No bugs there. No mercenaries, either. No guns. No fear. She began to drift...
**Stop!** Valiant commanded her.
Lina’s awareness popped back to reality. **What was I doing?**
**Moving your head. Up and down.**
She gave herself a grimace. Stupid Muttbutt. **Sorry. I had “Into the Woods” going through my mind. You know, “Into the woods you have to go, you must begin the journey.” I think that was my guides telling me that we have to get off the—**
**Obviously,** he retorted and let a beat pass. **Tell me why you’re here.**
**Why—? Because you pushed me down.**
**How did you get here? What brought you here now? I need to know that you’re not tied up in any of this.**
He must have shifted and done something to his shoulder because he sucked in a great, silent breath as all the muscles in his face and neck contracted.
The mercs repositioned their dish so it pointed directly above their heads.
Lina thought her hands were well-hidden. Within her mind she reached for white light, centered her chakras in it, and pictured Valiant’s etheric body—his shoulder—under her fingers. She could do remote Reiki at least. She willed warm energy into him.
**How’s that feel?** she asked.
He didn’t move. **Is that you? Are you doing that?** Though his position didn’t change, Lina thought he was relaxing, sinking deeper into his pile of humus. **How—? Crisse, I can feel that.**
One of the mercs looked around, obviously bored with his job. His gaze dropped to the forest floor just off to Lina’s left. If he looked closer... Lina felt dizzy as the fear rushed back full force.
**Let me worry about them. You tell me now. Everything.**
She kept her eyes riveted on the two men facing her as again they shifted the dish’s position by a few degrees, this time to Lina’s right. Though she never said a word out loud, she explained haltingly to Valiant how she’d gotten a phone call saying that a travel agent had underbooked and she could win a vacation to exotic Tiawa if she could leave immediately and make her own way to LA.
**A blind call?**
She told him how she’d checked with various agencies to make sure that this one was on the up-and-up, and how she’d recently had a few clients—**Come to think of it, they’ve all been new clients,** she mused—give her rave reviews about this particular agency. **I just assumed that they’d gotten my name from one of my regulars.**
**Clients.**
**Psychic readings.**
**Ah. Here we go.**
The mercs had said something Lina hadn’t caught, and now they began to disassemble their equipment. They packed it securely in the trailer, radioed someone who answered back with a static-y male voice, and then took off farther in the direction they’d been traveling.
The two of them waited a few minutes before they shook themselves out of their hiding place. Lina opened her mouth to tell Valiant that it was time to see to his shoulder, but he just steadied his sore arm with his good hand and waved her across the path with his chin.
“Into the woods,” he ordered her.
“But—”
“Four more ATVs heading this way. I want us deep in the woods by the time they get here. If we want out of this mess, we’ve got to stop hiding and put some miles between us and them.” The stare he gave her was steely. “We must begin the journey.”
She had to help him as they trampled through the rough terrain of the jungle. Farther and farther from the path, they pushed through wads of ferns, through sticky spider webs anchored by hanging vines. Some of the vines had needle-like thorns and somewhere out there an animal scurried through the undergrowth. Though he grimaced in disgust at himself each time he did so, Valiant whimpered when he had to slap at mosquitoes.
“Guess we should have gone by beach instead,” Lina muttered. She felt stupid for bringing Valiant this horrible, dangerous way. In addition to it all, she was responsible for his shoulder. If she’d let him go first down the rope, he wouldn’t be hurt.
“No, you were right about that. That’s the first route they took, the easiest. Next they take the easy inland routes—the paths and roads—until they establish a search perimeter.”
“And then?”
He frowned inwardly as if he considered more possibilities than he was telling. “And then they start moving into the woods. Working backward.”
“Valiant, how long—”
“Londo.” He stopped, slightly out of breath more from the pain then the exertion, and gave her a don’t-argue-with-me look. “My name is Londo.”
“How long before they start coming our way?”
He began to shrug and must have thought the better of it. “Sais pas. I don’t know. I don’t know how big this operation is. Is Terry just after me, or something more? Maybe it’s all terrorist war games, and I’m just a bonus.”
“Who’s he?”
“Who?”
“Terry.”
“She. Teresa Rhodes. Major mover and shaker on the terrorist supply circuit.”
“Oh.” Lina had never heard the name.
But Valiant wasn’t going to explain. Instead he turned and took a step in the direction they’d been moving, but stepped on a rock and stumbled. He winced with a withheld gasp. From his twitches she could almost trace the shot of pain as it jolted through him.
“What we’re doing now,” Lina commanded, “is taking care of that shoulder.”
“Not now.”
“We can’t do it if we’re hiding, Valiant.”
He shook his head violently, as if shaking the pain off. “I said, call me Londo.”
Lina stuck her chin out in defiance. “I will if you let me work on it. Besides,” she cajoled as he didn’t look convinced, “I’ve got some glass in me that I’d like to attend to.”
Sure enough, that decided it. She’d always imagined that he was chivalrous. He turned back to her with a reluctant nod. “You’re going to do that whatever you did back there?” he asked. “I could feel that. It was warm.”
“That was Reiki, and no, this calls for a different technique at first,” she told him. “I’ll need a snake and lots of lizard lips.”
That got a chuckle out of him. He seemed to relax. His glance slid over her body, then up to her face, meeting her eyes. How sharp and bright his eyes were, as if he could see right through her. This wasn’t some man on TV; Valiant was real. She looked away and pretended to take in their surroundings.
; “D’accord,” he said, “I may have deserved that. Now say it.”
“L—Londo.”
“There. Not so hard.”
Getting the vest off him proved difficult and unnecessarily painful, so they left his shirt on. From the way the shoulder didn’t fit right she could tell that it must be awfully swollen under there. Londo leaned against a tree to provide support and even out their height difference.
“This may be a little rough,” Lina warned him.
Lon sucked in his breath as Lina eased his arm to a level position, then braced it under her own arm. She held it lightly just below the shoulder.
“Just do it!” He hissed at her hesitation.
“I need to match your etheric field perfectly,” she replied with all the authority she could muster. Sue had taught her always to keep the client calm and informed. Lina tightened her grip, pulled out—twisted—and eased the shoulder back in.
Londo yelled and tried to jump away despite the tree at his back, but she kept him firmly in her grasp.
“Agh, f—, aw christ,” he groaned. She released him. “Next time, try to make it hurt a little more.” He heaved a sigh and slid down the tree. “Sorry. I mean, it feels much better.” But he was panting.
“The worst part’s over. I know what I’m doing now,” Lina said. She sat on her knees next to him and placed both hands lightly on his swollen shoulder in proper position. “Hot for pain again, then cold for swelling.”
“Make it quick. We need to be moving.”
She should tell him out loud he was being tyrannical—many non-Southern men didn’t understand the significance of the baleful Southern Eye she gave him—but didn’t. “The healing will be incomplete. I’ll have to finish it later. All you have to do now is relax and talk while I work, okay?”
“Yes, mother. Skurny marde, I can feel that. This must be what a hot compress feels like.” His chin dropped as the tension lessened. “Is it always like this? Do norms go through this pain every day?”
“Dislocated shoulders aren’t that common,” Lina said.
He grunted affirmation but it also seemed to be a cover for a groan. She told his cells to relax and let her work.
“Is this doing anything for my... other condition?” he asked hopefully.
Goodness, she’d actually forgotten that for a moment. “I think I’d need a lot more time to fix that,” she told him. “Maybe a few hours or more someplace where I could concentrate and figure things out. And, well, it’s not like I’m a doctor. These methods aren’t guaranteed. Oh right, I was supposed to tell you that before we started. Psychic ethics, you know.”
“Hmf.” He shifted but at least this time he didn’t look like it caused him agony. “We’re making toward safety as it is. Once we reach it, you’ll get that time you need.”
But he looked at her strangely, like he had other ideas for how he’d spend safe time. But he couldn’t be thinking anything like that. Lina reminded herself of her Muttbutt loser status.
“Please,” she said, “tell me what’s going on. I don’t think you’re here on vacation?”
He shook his head with a grim set to his mouth. “Mais non, I was tracking Terry. She’s been too quiet lately. I think she gets more insane every time I see her—and I run into her every few months. She’s into aiding large-scale terrorism, and I just happened to catch wind back in New York that she was planning something big and soon, somewhere.” He gave little laugh. “Not much to go on. An informant of mine got me a lead that pointed here.”
Lina struggled to keep her mind on both the conversation and the healing. “Terrorism in the tropics? I didn’t think there was any religious war here. This is a pretty out-of-the-way place.”
“Oui. French Polynesia; this is about as out of the way as it gets. Which island is this? Bora-Bora? No, this isn’t—”
“Tiawa,” Lina said.
He nodded. “Ah oui, Tiawa. Let’s just say that my informant is my informant no more. This was obviously a set-up.” Londo’s eyes darkened as his eyebrows drew together. His nose wrinkled in distaste. “Obviously. I should have realized... I could have taken some precautions.”
“But you didn’t, so there’s no need to worry about woulda-coulda now,” Lina told him. She shifted to brace his shoulder so she could reach the muscles in back better. Under the subtle gray-on-gray stripes, warm flesh filled the satiny shirt. Her hands touched firm muscle and not just an image on a TV screen. This was a being as real as she was. Here was Valiant, really and truly in person!
She forced her mind back to what she was doing as well as what he was saying. This was no time for star-struck mooning, as if she were some kind of stupid para-groupie. Her membership in the Valiant Fan Club had expired years ago. Snap out of it! It was just that he looked exactly like his pictures only more so, and here he was in person—so incredibly handsome and heroic. Hell, he’d come to her rescue! A pleasure of warmth washed through her at the thought. Maybe reality wasn’t that bad.
“You said this Terry was a terrorist...” she prompted.
“Usually she targets scientific or arms materiel for resale. Every now and then she comes after me. Who can understand Terry? Sometimes she acts like... like... And sometimes she’s determined to kill me.” His voice lowered to a confidential level. “We used to be an item—before I realized how crazy she was. En fait, I was crazy in my own way back then.”
“Crazy? You?” The warmth in Lina’s hands had slacked off with her inattention. She summoned the healing energy again and Londo shifted to get more comfortable.
“Eh bien, I was a little—no, a lot desperate. And frustrated as hell. I was—” His mouth worked and he turned his face entirely from her.
Lina returned to her position in front. She was ready to start the cooling phase of the healing, but she hesitated. She needed to reassure him somehow. Ordinarily the healer could give a neutral touch on the arm. The healer/client relationship could be misunderstood, she’d been taught, so always be extra careful to be neutral. But though she could touch if she had to in order to heal, she couldn’t touch to reassure someone. She had to keep her distance. Instead she put the reassurance into her voice.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me, Londo. But you should know that I’m an ordained priest. Anything you say to me in confidence will stay that way.”
“Good lord!” Lon exclaimed with a laugh. “I mean, good grief. A psychic healer and a priest. They let you become a priest? I mean, the church and psychics...” Again he eyed her up and down. “Not to mention the female thing—”
She blushed at the perusal and hoped he didn’t notice. “There’s no church involved; it’s not that kind of order. Most of the members are psychics of some kind. Psychic work is illegal in a lot of places, you know. But if you can say that you’re practicing your religion—”
“Ordination to escape prosecution—”
“I can understand that there’re a lot of so-called psychics out there fleecing people, but there are more who are trying to help, and they’re getting harassed by the legal system.”
“So you all set up a phony order.” Sensing illegal activity, Londo was beginning to sound more like Valiant with each passing moment.
Lina’s defenses sprang into full operation. “It’s not phony! It’s legitimate. I’ve never met a member who wasn’t an honest person—well, pretty much as people go. And quite a few Near Death survivors swear that the Order’s got an excellent reputation on the Other Side.”
“Oh, the Other Side. Now I know I’m talking to a gen-u-ine psychic,” Londo drawled.
Lina forced herself to calm down. Healing a client while upset was unprofessional and counterproductive. Primly she placed her hands on his shoulder in proper position and summoned a cooling energy. “Surely in your business you know lots of psychics. You must deal with all kinds of people.”
“I told you, call me Londo,” he said, and they both chorused, “Don’t call me Shirley.”
“Old joke.”
Lina wrinkled her nose for his efforts.
“Not that old. Psychics. Well, I know one telepath very well, but she’s not from Earzh. I’ve never heard her say anything about guides or the Other Side or psychic healing.”
“Golly day, what kind of telepath is she?”
“Highly trained.”
Lina made a rude noise. “It doesn’t sound like she is. I’m a Sagittarian; I talk first and think later, and so I usually tell my clients about guides and such. Maybe what she’s highly trained in is not saying weird things in front of people who don’t want to understand.”
Was he looking to the heavens, or was that a half-roll of his eyes? “She’s always seemed very skilled to me. D’accord, what’s this order about?”
She changed her hand positions and gave a tentative smile. “About fifteen years old.” The smile he returned was relaxed and generous. “Really, the only requirement for joining is that if someone asks you for help, that’s what you give them.”
“C’est tout? That’s it?”
“Isn’t that enough? I mean, it’s pretty close to what you do for a living, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so. Close enough.” Londo rotated his shoulder under her hands and she clucked a warning. “And I guess that I shouldn’t question the motives of anyone who can do what you’ve done with this shoulder.”
“How’s it feeling? I’m doing a feedback loop on it and it seems to me like it’s getting there.”
“What does that mean, that you’re feeling what I feel?”
“Something like that. To make sure that I’m doing it right.” She shook her hands out away from the two of them, wishing she had some salt water to rinse her arms. “Tell you what, I’ll stop it there and we’ll finish up later. I’ve got some pieces of glass in me that are driving me crazy. How about you?”
Londo said, “Most just bounced off my clothes.” He flexed his spine and shoulders, testing. “Oh. Ah oui, I think I may have some still, too. Ouch, in my neck.” He reached around with his good hand and picked something out, glancing at it before he threw it to the ground.
“I can work on the cuts later,” Lina said, twisting to get at that annoying piece of glass in the center of her back. She cursed under her breath as she couldn’t reach it.
Touch of Danger (Three Worlds) Page 3