by Julie Miller
BJ stopped in her tracks. Her breath came in shallow, uneven gasps. “I can't do this.”
Damon turned her away from the window, wrapping his hand around Duke's muzzle to control the dog's snarling. “Of course, you can.”
“Duke doesn't even like this.”
Damon smiled indulgently. He tapped his finger on the tip of her nose in a gesture one might use with a small child. “My dear Bridget. I won't let anything happen to you. You are too precious to me.”
For an instant, BJ's mind went blank.
“Do you understand?” She heard Damon's voice in the distance.
The shadow blinked and then was gone.
BJ rubbed at her right temple, knowing everything one moment, knowing nothing the next.
“What are you doing to me?” she asked, frowning.
“It's nothing.” Damon squeezed her shoulder, his eyes filled with concern. “Are you all right?”
BJ had to think a moment. Was she all right? “I guess.”
She let Damon turn her toward the door adjoining the two rooms. “Let me introduce you to my friends.”
The names escaped her, but their professions registered. Psychiatrist. Mathematics professor. Private detective. Neurotechnologist. Registered nurse.
An odd combination, but Damon reminded her that a true think tank contained a diversity of individuals. He never assumed that only one field of expertise could provide answers to his questions.
She clutched Duke in one arm while she sat on the end of the table, drawing her legs up pretzel-style. The nurse arranged the pillows behind her so she could lean against the wall. With deft hands, he taped suction cups in the vee of her elbow, at her temple, and over her heart.
She watched him hook her up to machines to monitor her heart rate, pulse, and the electrical activity in her brain. BJ sat silently, quelling her misgivings because Damon had such faith in her.
This whole setup felt wrong. Everything felt clinical, sterile. Hostile. But Damon winked at her, giving her a small morsel of encouragement. The psychiatrist asked Damon to move to the adjoining office to observe the session.
“Promise you'll be there?” BJ requested, giving in to a moment of panic.
“I promise.” He kissed her brow, then left the room.
Duke settled in her lap, fortifying BJ with his calming presence. She forced a game smile for the others in the room. “So what do you want to know?”
“Name the resulting states of the dissolved Soviet Union.”
“Huh?” BJ slowly answered. “Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania...”
Before she reached the fourth in the list, they launched a bombardment of questions.
“Calculate the probability…Quantum theory…Which president…In what year…A combustion engine…”
The answers to each wove themselves into a maze inside her head. Each time she spoke, someone shot a new question at her. Duke grumbled in her lap. Her muscles tensed.
“What is the faulty logic of this statement?”
“Wait a minute—stop this!” she snapped. “Damon? What the hell are you people doing? What does Chester A. Arthur have to do with me?”
Damon reentered the room, coming quickly to BJ's side. The nurse checked printouts from the machines.
Damon pushed BJ back to her seat when she tried to get up. Though his hands were firm, his voice was gentle. “Shh, relax, Bridget. I'm sorry we panicked you, but the barrage of questions is per my instructions. The random questions distract you, they remove you from the immediacy of your situation. Concentrating on the answers allows them to access your subconscious mind without you putting up any conscious barriers. It's nothing to worry about.”
It's nothing.
A fuzzy part of her brain thought she could understand Damon's logic. But a smaller, distant part of her began slipping backward in time.
“You know what this reminds me of.”
His fingertips on her lips shushed her. “I won't let them hurt you.”
Damon backed to the door and left her. She pulled Duke up to her chest and nuzzled her cheek against his soft, curly hair. She leaned into the pillows and focused her tattered nerves, attempting to keep her mind in the present.
But the passionless faces swam before her. They swirled into another set of faces. History. Math. Computers. Shadows. Symbols. Stalkers.
“I don't believe you, Bridget. Where did you get the answers?”
“I didn't cheat. I figured them out. It's not that hard.”
“Don't lie to us. You're a clever girl. But you can't fool me.”
“Make it stop.” She barely recognized her own voice.
Past and present blended into one. Duke's growl rumbled through a thickening fog. BJ curled against the pillows. She wanted her daddy. Her chin bowed to her chest. The questions kept coming. She answered what she could, but soon the words turned into static. The faces blurred into black and white and shades of grey.
Why didn't Damon stop this?
A helpless, confused child, she called to him. Reaching through the years. Reaching through the darkness. Calling for the one person who could snatch her away from her terror.
Chapter Nine
“Where is she?” Brodie repeated the question through clenched teeth, doing his utmost to remember that the security guard was not at fault. He pinned the guard by the neck with his forearm, getting closer and closer to doing real physical harm.
Bent backward over his own desk, the guard didn't waver in his loyalty to Morrisey. “I can't give out that information.”
“Then I'll find her myself. Sorry.” Brodie added the quick, flat apology while at the same time he adjusted his forearm and applied pressure to the guard's neck. Within a minute, he passed out, unharmed, but temporarily out of Brodie's way.
Brodie dumped the unconscious guard back in his chair and rifled through the papers on top of the desk, looking for some kind of directory. A blinking light on the computer screen beside him caught his attention: Level Five—Off Limits. Experiment in Progress.
“Level five it is.” Brodie jogged past the elevators, opting for the stairs, in case the guard recovered and activated some kind of security lock down.
He took the stairs quickly. He was breathing harder by the time he reached the fifth floor fire door, more from fear and anticipation than from exertion.
The door opened into a labyrinthine layout of short hallways and offices. He tapped his fist against one wall, confirming his suspicion. Thick. Soundproof. The barriers might delay him, but they wouldn't stop him. He'd break down every door to locate BJ. He had a gut feeling her sanity, if not her very life, depended on him.
One by one he pushed doors open, methodically working his way through the maze, checking every corner and closet that would be big enough to hide a woman.
The barking alerted him first. Faint and muffled, it grew in intensity as Brodie trained his ears to the sound and followed it. Flattening his back against the wall, he slipped around one corner, catching a glimpse of a blond man in a lab coat disappearing around the next turn. The man shuffled ahead at a furtive pace, carrying a bundle of some kind in front of him.
With long, silent steps, Brodie positioned himself behind the man. Then, in one swift, sure move, Brodie captured him in a headlock. “Where is she?” he whispered.
The man said nothing.
“Where?” Brodie jerked a little harder, lifting the man off his feet. The bundle yapped and fell to the floor. In a flurry of twisting and shaking, Duke emerged from the rolled-up blanket.
Brodie turned the man and shoved him against the wall, holding him up by the lapels of his coat. “Where?”
Duke's high-pitched bark echoed the question. But Brodie knew they wouldn't get any answers. One look into the man's wide, unseeing eyes told him that. He dropped the man to his feet.
Brodie repeated the same maneuver he had used to neutralize the guard at the front desk and let the man slump to the floor.
Brodie looked down at his l
ast, best hope. “Show me BJ, boy.”
The dog backed toward the wall, growling, keeping the unconscious body between them. Brodie’s impatience flared briefly before he dropped to his haunches. This wasn't the time to vent his temper. As much as he and the dog disliked each other, he needed Duke's help.
“I'm on your side, pal. I love her, too.”
Brodie developed a quick respect for the intelligence of poodles. The dog hesitated an instant, as though evaluating his motives and sincerity. Then Duke gave an arrogant little humph of a bark, climbed over the prone body and trotted past Brodie.
He followed the small black trailblazer.
Duke moved unerringly through the corridors, tracing his mistress's scent. He stopped at an unmarked door and scratched at the base. Brodie tested the knob and found it locked. Duke continued scratching while Brodie wedged his knife between the door and jamb, forcing the lock.
Duke squeezed through the opening as soon as he could fit and Brodie entered the empty office a step behind. The darkness in the office made the light from the adjoining interior room seem that much brighter.
Brodie looked through the glass and swore viciously. BJ huddled on top of a tall table, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms wrapped in the hem of her shirt and clutched between her legs and body. She chanted the same word over and over.
His name. Brodie.
She rocked back and forth, staring at a spot on the floor. Wires connected her to a whirring machine, which spat out a steady stream of zigzagging graphs. This sinister reproduction of her childhood nightmare could serve no purpose but evil. Her terror filled the room and seeped through the glass.
That bastard had done this to her. A rage swelled inside Brodie so powerful that he knew he could commit cold-blooded murder. His palms itched with the desire to strangle that madman.
Duke clawed at the connecting door, snapping him back to sensibility. Getting BJ out of this cruel asylum should be his primary concern. Brodie tried the handle and found it had been bolted from the inside. He pounded on the connecting window.
“BJ! Can you hear me?”
Duke tipped his head back and whined in chorus. BJ's staring eyes blinked. “Duke?”
Her breathy plea galvanized Brodie. He scanned the outer room for something big and hard enough to break through the glass. He picked up the executive chair from behind the desk.
Three more people in lab coats sat in the room with BJ, as still as plastic mannequins. Why didn't she run? Why didn't she tell them off the way she seemed to take such pleasure in putting him in his place? A fourth person, a woman, showed him an answer he didn't want to see. With precise, mechanical movements, she set a bottle on a medicine cart, then raised her hands to the light and tapped a syringe.
“No!”
Brodie lifted the chair like a battering ram and bashed the window, splintering it in a spider web of tiny cracks. The unflinching woman looked over her shoulder at the sound, fixing glazed eyes on Brodie. Just as slowly and purposefully, she turned away.
“Stop it!” He smashed the glass a second time, breaking an arm off the chair. “BJ, fight her!”
The woman pushed up BJ's sleeve and swabbed her arm with a gauze pad. In halting slow-motion, BJ pulled her arm away and sank back into the pillows. Two of the men rose and advanced, seizing her by either arm, dragging her to the edge of the table.
“No!” Frightened into raw fury, Brodie hurled the broken chair across the room and kicked at the window. Once. The glass bowed. He kicked again, shattering the window, raining splinters of glass in the other room.
Brodie climbed across the divider, knocking interfering bits of hanging glass out of the way with his fists. In a single stride he reached the woman, grabbed the syringe out of her hand and crushed it beneath his boot. Thankfully, the contents had not yet been injected into BJ. Uncaring that his adversary was a woman, he flattened his hand over her sternum and shoved her across the room.
The two pasty faced men holding BJ released her and came at him. One raised his fist, the other charged his midsection. Brodie deflected the punch with his forearm, but staggered backward when the second man hit him. He shifted his feet and regained his balance, slanting a blow at the first man, catching him at the juncture of neck and shoulder, dropping him to the floor. He raised his knee and toppled the second man with a thrust to the gut.
Brodie charged the clear path to BJ. She climbed up on her knees and reached for him. Her questing fingers touched the corner of his mouth, tracing a scar, seeking something familiar.
“Daddy?” she called to him in a fuzzy voice. “I wanna go home.”
“It's Brodie. You're safe.”
He clutched her around the waist, binding her to him, only marginally reassured by the warmth he felt through her clothes. With rough, urgent fingers, he pulled the electrode pads off her skin, cursing the red marks left behind.
“Brodie.” She pronounced his name as if she were deciding whether she liked the sound of it on her tongue. The lack of recognition concerned him. This was clearly an episode. But what purpose did it serve? Why take her back to her darkest fears? His rage at this unjust cruelty was so profound that it blinded him to the third man advancing from behind.
The blow to his unprotected back knocked him forward. He curled an arm around BJ, cushioning her from his crushing weight. His kidney ached, but it didn't slow his reflexes. When the attendant attacked him again, Brodie jerked sideways, jabbing with his elbow. He felt the give beneath his arm, heard the pop of bone and cartilage.
The man landed on the floor, holding his bloodied nose, shaking his head. Waking up.
“They're all in some kind of trance,” he muttered. He captured BJ's face in his hands, seeking clarity in her deep green eyes. “Are you with me, honey? Did they hurt you?”
She reached for him, burrowing her face against his neck. “Damon will take care of me. He promised.”
Brodie swept BJ into his arms, afraid to ever let her go. He carried her over the partition into the outer room. Duke barked joyously, jumping up and down at his feet. He strode out the room and down the corridor toward the stairwell.
Duke's growl warned him before he turned the last corner. Brodie stopped in his tracks, face to face with Damon Morrisey. Three armed security guards backed him, including the one from the front desk. Their guns were drawn and aimed at Brodie.
Damon waved his hand to his men. “Lower your weapons. I don't want to risk hurting her.”
The guards obeyed, but Brodie didn't relax. “Snap her out of this. I know you're controlling her somehow. She doesn't deserve this.”
“Where are you taking her?” Damon's smooth drawl scraped against his ears. BJ murmured Brodie's name in a groggy voice and snuggled closer. The tension in her muscles seeped into his arms as she struggled to beat exhaustion and find restful sleep. Brodie would protect this woman at any cost. He'd trade his life for hers if he had one to give.
He'd burn in hell if for her sake if he could just take this sorcerer with him.
“I'm taking her home. Away from this madhouse you've created.”
“She's known nothing but pain and confusion since you entered her life.” Damon's eyes turned black, mocking. “She came to me because you hurt her. She is an innocent in so many ways. Easily taken in, easily hurt. She mistook your pitiful sense of duty for something more meaningful.”
“You bastard.”
“She hears nothing now because I wish it so. Your condemnation of me means nothing to her.” Evenly modulated laughter rolled in Damon's throat. “She trusts me more than you, warrior. You saw to that yourself. I'm helping her. I'm getting you out of her system. Taking her back to a time when you didn't exist for her. A time when she would turn only to me for help.”
“You can't leave her like this.”
“I don't intend to. She's of little use to me as a child.” Damon snapped his fingers. His silver ring flashed before Brodie's eyes. He steeled his hold around BJ, shielding her from a
sorcerer's curse.
Brodie felt a subtle change in BJ's body. A release, perhaps. She grew slightly heavier, relaxing into true sleep.
“She'll remember nothing of this when she wakes up.”
“Then why torture her?”
Damon waved his hand over his shoulder. The three guards dispersed, walking past Brodie without acknowledgment, as though he and BJ and Damon were invisible. Brodie pitied men who were so easily influenced.
“A child's mind is much easier to control. I'm merely reinforcing my influence. Apparently you've become quite a distraction.” Damon stroked the back of BJ's hair. Brodie turned her out of reach. “It pains me to see her question my advice.”
“Let me put you out of your misery.”
Damon scoffed at him. “If I stood here and let you run me through, you could not kill me. I must strike the blow or provide the means to kill myself. So it was written ages ago. And I have no intention of committing suicide or allowing anyone else to turn my hand. Not with the modern world at my fingertips.”
“You can be beaten, sorcerer. I'll find a way.”
Damon folded his arms together, nonplussed by the threat. “The last time you tried to destroy me, you took the life of an innocent young woman. History seems destined to repeat itself.”
Brodie shifted BJ in his arms, damning the amount of guilt a man's soul could stand. If only guilt could kill him. He'd have been peacefully buried centuries ago. But guilt didn't kill. It tortured. It punished. It forced others to pay a price that should be his.
“When will it end?” He rasped the words past the tight constriction in his throat. “Does BJ have to die? Doesn't her death punish you as well as me?”
“Don't play strategy on me, warrior. The sacrifice that frees you must be willingly given. Bridget would not betray me. Loyalty means everything to her. And if she should stray…”