One of Sean’s hands clenched the armrest. “The same.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
Sean’s hard blue eyes snapped to Michael’s. “I hate babysitting a chick who keeps trying to kill me, all right?”
“Did she hurt you?”
“No, but Jesus fucking Christ, Mike. You’ve got her in a cage.” Sean surged to his feet and Michael was forced to take a step back. Not good. “What the hell is this?” Sean demanded.
Michael calmly slid his hands into his pockets and recovered the ground lost. “You know what it is. It’s my collection.”
“Am I part of your collection?”
“No. You’re my brother.”
Sean ran an agitated hand around the back of his neck and let out a harsh laugh. “But you collected me, too, just like all the others. I didn’t ask to join you. The others didn’t come along until Lea found them, but I know they didn’t ask for it either.”
“Where is this coming from all of a sudden?” Truthfully, Michael had feared the day Sean started to question.
Sean ignored him. “For the longest time I thought they willingly came to us. But that’s bullshit, isn’t it? You think I haven’t noticed those little yellow pills you make Robert take every day? How he glares at you behind your back? I’m pretty sure he’d kill Lea if he had the chance.”
“So explain Jase then.” Michael shrugged, hands still in his pockets. “The guy’s as loyal as they come.”
Sean ignored him again. Michael was starting to lose his patience, and no one in the world was granted a wider window of patience than his half brother.
“What do you have on them? How is Lea getting them to work for you? For free?”
“She has her ways.”
“But she doesn’t have anything on the fire chick or else she wouldn’t be here against her will.” Sean thrust a finger toward the front door. “Now Lea’s gone off to bring back another water elemental? Are you crazy?”
Michael gave a stiff shake of the head. “The second one is her idea.”
“So was the fire elemental. Who will kill us all. Who you are keeping in a cage.”
Michael picked up the remote from where it rested on the recliner arm, and switched off the TV. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t like the cage either.” He wanted her as free as Jase and Robert and Fiona. He wanted her as his. But what he really wanted was to waltz her in front of Raymond. “You’re yelling at the wrong person. That was Lea’s call.”
“If you don’t like it, why is she here then? She’s a prisoner. You go in there every day and gape at her like she’s made of diamonds.”
Because she was. A rare, precious, beautiful thing that only he owned.
“What is this,” Sean barked, “the Middle Ages? That shit just doesn’t happen anymore.”
Michael got right in Sean’s face. “Don’t you dare let her out.”
Sean flinched back. “Fuck no, I’m not letting her out. Are you kidding me? I’m not dying that way.”
Michael recognized the disgust that twisted Sean’s mouth all too well. It’s how Michael had looked at their father pretty much every day since the morning his mom had walked out. Sean was everything to Michael. After Michael had broken Sean out of that hospital, he vowed he’d be better to Sean than Raymond Ebrecht had ever been to him.
Michael placed his hands on the younger man’s shoulders. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you?”
Sean went to the window and stared out again. Suddenly he looked so much older. Just yesterday, it seemed, the hired mercenary had retrieved the boy from that hospital, and Michael had brought the scared fifteen-year-old into his house and his life. Now here was this person with broad shoulders and a deep voice, wearing the same face as that kid.
“When are you bringing me in, Mike?”
“You are in.”
Sean released a shout of frustration that bounced over the pool table and around the room. Michael had never heard his brother make a sound like that before.
“No, I’m not.” Sean rounded on him. “I’m your goddamn errand boy. I hide out, waiting for you to tell me what to do. I’m bored, I’m useless, I’m kept in the dark, treated like a kid…and I want to know how you plan on using me like you’re using them.”
He didn’t admit it, but Michael had already used Sean. He’d shoved it in Raymond’s face that he was embracing the son Raymond had refused to acknowledge.
“Look.” Michael placed a hand on the window and leaned closer to his brother. “I’m not going to use you now or in the future. And I want you to be a part of the studio. I really do. But if you just reappear, the doctors—the government—will find you again. So much would be lost.”
Sean crossed his arms. He was shorter than Michael but twice as strong. “What if I walk?”
Michael’s hand dropped from the window, his fingers drawing sweat lines down the glass. “You wouldn’t. I’m your only family.”
“No, you’re not. I have parents. Who want to know where I am.”
“Who left you in a fucking hospital!”
Sean drew back as though Michael had slapped him. Good.
“If you left me now,” Michael said, “and went back to them, they’d call the hospital. It was a government hospital, Sean. You’re not a minor, they couldn’t commit you against your will again, but your reappearance could ruin everything.”
“Ruin you, you mean.”
Michael briefly closed his eyes. “Ruin us. We’re both Splitters. And Lea is adamant about keeping all magic secret. She knows more than us, I’ll admit to that. She knows giving the government access would mean death.”
Sean shoved past him. Holy shit, he was leaving. He was actually going to leave.
“Sean. Sean.”
There was nothing Michael could use to make him stay. Splitting wouldn’t do it; two Seans would trounce two Michaels any day. None of the other elementals were here to get his back. Words were the only weapons he had.
“Stay,” Michael said to his brother’s back, “and I’ll tell you how I found you. How I got you out.”
Sean had almost reached the hall leading to the kitchen. He stopped walking. The muscles in his shoulders bunched. He turned around. There were tears in his eyes.
“Is that what it would’ve taken? After all these years? All I had to do was threaten to walk out?”
“It’s time you knew. You’re right. You’re not a kid. You’re not an errand boy. You’re my brother and I need you. I got you out of there because you’re family, and Raymond had denied you.”
Sean ran a hand through his sandy hair. “How did you find out about me?”
Michael breathed stiffly through his nose. “It’s no secret I hated Raymond. He fucked me up good. I was trying to find ways to get back at him and I was spying in his office. Found e-mails from your mom, telling him about you. And from him, refusing to acknowledge you.”
“Jesus.” There was so much hurt in Sean’s eyes it pained Michael to see, because it was exactly how he’d felt growing up.
“So I dug around to find you. You were thirteen then, and your mom and the guy you’d thought was your father had committed you. I paid someone really well to tell me that they’d turned you in because they walked in on you after you’d split. You were playing checkers with yourself. They thought you were crazy, and after they’d committed you, you were starting to believe it. I wanted to help you, Sean. I’ve only ever wanted to help you.”
What was this weird shudder in his chest? This odd tingle in his nose? Michael looked away and focused on a pair of skiers starting the run. “When Raymond found out I could split like he could, I thought it would be the beginning of a real relationship with my father. It wasn’t. Just the opposite. He resented me even more because my existence made him less special. I knew I had to get you out, give you the support I never had.”
“How did you get me out?”
“I found out who your doctor was. Followed him ar
ound. Learned his routine.”
“Doctor Miguel?” The expression on Sean’s face was odd. Almost wistful. Almost like he missed the guy.
“Miguel Rosa, yes. When I learned the hospital you were in was a federal psych research facility the public didn’t know about, I knew I needed outside help. I took a code name, Tracker, and hired someone. Well, two someones. The first mercenary didn’t work out. He bailed on the contract and disappeared, along with a shitload of my money. I tried to go after him, but he vanished and you became far more important. The second mercenary was the guy who broke you out.” Michael opened his hands. “The end.”
“But it’s not the end,” Sean murmured, slowly shaking his head at the carpet. “It can’t be.”
“It’s been better with me, hasn’t it? Better than with your parents?”
Sean lifted his head, but his eyes stared far away. “Yeah. It’s been better than home.”
“I’m on your side.” Michael reached out and pulled his little brother into a tight embrace. “And don’t ever forget that you are on mine.”
ELEVEN
The first things Cat saw were Xavier’s legs. Impossibly long, they stuck out from where he sat in one of the hotel lobby’s plush chairs. She’d taken the stairs from her second-floor room, and he was watching the elevator, so she gave herself a moment to stare when he didn’t know.
The fingers on his right hand danced on his knee, and she recognized the nervous tic. She’d watched his arm and hand move his knife over the cutting board exactly the same way. He’d been so graceful and quick, so confident and beautifully calm. So very different from the agitated man who’d sat next to her in the theater, or the powerfully sexy man who’d pushed her against that wall and stolen her breath.
He held back so much, and she was beginning to see that maybe it didn’t entirely have to do with the tourist. She’d thought, when he’d invited her back to his house and had made it clear that there couldn’t be anything sexual between them, that she could handle that. Except that she craved him. She dreamed of that hard, unbridled passion on the stairs. Last night, upstairs in her hotel room, she’d pictured him lost to lust and felt the phantom weight of his hips as they circled against her. She’d touched herself, but it hadn’t satisfied. She only wanted him more.
When he’d proposed this little outing, she’d hid her enthusiasm. Played it off like she could squeeze him in between appointments, when really she soared with happiness. He had no idea what he did to her, and since her time here was so short and he was obviously fighting any attraction to her, she wouldn’t let him know.
“Hi.”
His head whipped around. He jumped to his feet, and his height never failed to make her gasp.
“Cat.” Denied desire colored the sound of her name. She smiled.
“So where are we going? I’m dying to know.”
A small lift of his shoulders. “Still a surprise.”
“Am I dressed all right? It’s the warmest stuff I have.” She raised her arms, bulky in a sweater and her thick coat.
He ignored her clothing and looked right into her eyes. “You look great.”
“I need to be back by eleven. Is that okay?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Where’s your car?”
His lips flattened and he broke eye contact. “Don’t have one. But the bus will get us where we need to go.”
“I’m so intrigued.”
“I hope you like it.” The guarded panic on his face told her he was scared to death that she wouldn’t.
The bus filled up with people in town, but as it snaked through the side streets and puttered to the outlying areas where the chain grocery store and big box home repair monstrosity loomed, it emptied out. Eventually only Cat and Xavier remained. The great bus engine whirred beneath them, and they said nothing to each other. Though he sat right next to her in the orange bucket seat, he’d nudged himself all the way to the opposite edge.
When they’d reached the very edge of civilization, when all that stood between the bus and the white wilderness was a lone gas station at the intersection of a couple of two-lane roads, he reached across her and pulled the stop chain. They exited the bus on the side of the road, where salt and tires had ground the snow into a disgusting black mess.
“Oh, Xavier.” She pulled on the red hat. “What a lovely gas station. You shouldn’t have.”
Was that amusement on his face? Why didn’t he just let it show?
He nudged his chin toward a small, empty parking lot flanked by the telltale bulky brown signs of the park service. A thick layer of new powder draped over the words and she couldn’t make them out.
He tugged on gloves but didn’t bother with a hat. She’d never seen him wear one. Not that she was complaining; she loved the way he flipped his hair off his face. She remembered how the coarse waves felt between her fingers.
A rough set of stone steps rose up from the parking lot and he headed for them.
“More stairs? You’re determined to kill me, aren’t you?”
“Sorry. These are the only ones. Then it levels off. I promise.”
He smiled. That rusty grin he didn’t quite know what to do with. It made her catch her breath. Made her want to keep him in perpetual delight so those two lines of fear and self-doubt would never again appear between his eyebrows.
At the top of the steps, a gently used path meandered through a thick forest. It had snowed right after daybreak and a fresh layer of flakes settled into old cross-country ski and snowshoe tracks.
“This way,” he said, secrets and cloaked joy pulling at the corners of his mouth.
It was like he’d shrugged off a coat of iron in the past twenty-four hours. Something had spurred this quiet assurance in him, and she loved it. She’d follow him just about anywhere right now.
They kicked through the pristine snow, barely entering the forest before the shush of the boughs swallowed the intermittent sounds of the road. Like on the bus, they didn’t speak, but then, she didn’t really feel the need to. Why did she feel so comfortable around him? Like she already knew him, already trusted him?
“How are you doing?” He peeked at her sidelong. “Feet warm enough?”
She waved a mitten. “I’m convinced I’ll never be warm again, but it’s fine. This is so beautiful.”
“And you haven’t even seen the best part.”
He veered off the path and into the heart of the trees. The only tracks here were those from small animals, and she had to wade through nearly foot-deep snow.
Maybe that was it. Maybe the snow was making her feel this way. After all, it was water. Only it had been so long since she’d seen the frozen stuff she hadn’t recognized its diluted call.
Xavier stopped and she almost ran into him, not realizing she’d been staring at the way the flakes rolled off her boots, like waves in the shallows. She lifted her eyes and saw where he pointed.
They stood on the lip of a smooth sheet of lake ice. The wind blew across it, gathering handfuls of snow and whipping them around in little tornadoes. On the other side, a tumble of gray rocks stair-stepped back up into the mountain, and there, frozen in bulbous, green-white ice, a waterfall hung in stasis.
She’d never seen anything like it.
Silent now, she imagined what would happen in the spring when the world released the pause button. The ice would crack and splinter, and water would return. Sound would flow through. First a steady drip, then a roar. She wished she could be there to witness it, to see the water come alive again.
“Do you like it?”
When she turned, Xavier wasn’t looking at the ice-bound miracle. He watched her. Very intently.
“So, so much.”
“In the summer this place is filled with hikers. I like it better now.” He cleared his throat. “Want to walk out to it? There’s probably a good foot or two of ice on the lake.”
She’d gone ice skating once, when she was eight or nine and the pond on her fo
ster parents’ farm outside Bloomington had frozen over. She’d stuffed socks into the toes of the woman’s childhood skates and hobbled out onto the ice. She fell a lot, and didn’t remember it being much fun, but that was before her body had changed and she’d begun to feel water reaching out to her.
Now, as she nudged her toes onto the ice, she could almost sense the water chugging below her. She dragged her feet slowly, watching how the gray ice appeared once the snow wiped away. Water everywhere, in so many forms, and she still had no idea why it had such a great presence in her head.
When they reached the bottom of the thirty-foot falls, Cat gazed up at it in awe, but also with a lump in her throat. Like you love it and hate it, Helen had said.
“I’ve never painted ice,” she murmured, then ran a mittened hand over the milky, lumpy surface. There it lingered, deep, deep below: that gentle pulse. A kind of heartbeat belonging to a living thing she feared she’d never understand.
But that was such a silly thought, to consider water alive. To believe that it wanted to talk to her, to know her.
Ice #1 begged for her attention. She wondered if she’d be able to paint it when she went back, or if this sensation would die. She’d never had to wait so long to hold a brush, and her hand began to feel like Xavier’s had looked, moving with the ghost of a knife.
When she faced him again, she made sure to smile. His head tilted to one side. He seemed to be searching for something.
“Thank you,” she said. “I needed this after yesterday.”
He frowned. “You mean breakfast?”
“No, no. After that. And maybe the day before. Nothing to do with you.” No. Xavier, with his girl issues and his killer kiss, was the least weird aspect of her week.
“What happened?”
She stepped back to get a full view of the waterfall again. “I’m nervous about the show.”
He did that thing where he pulled his hair away from his eyes with thumb and forefinger, and she bit her bottom lip because she liked it so much.
“Can you back out?” he asked.
“Oh, gosh, I can’t do that. I want this. I need this.”
A Taste of Ice (The Elementals) Page 10