by Dee, Bonnie
Justin reached a hand across the table as if to cover hers, then stopped and let his hand lie there on the tabletop.
“I believe my parents loved each other in their own warped way, but neither was going to change who or what they were. My dad disappeared for long periods, but never could stay away from us completely. He always came back. But even in the times when Daddy was out of the picture, Mama’s family wouldn’t have anything to do with us.”
“That must have been hard.”
Elyse laughed harshly. “You know what’s it’s like being a Terran kid trying to pass as human. Imagine if you were completely cut off from all our kind, a total outsider. I was already a pretty angry kid. When Mama died, I hated the whole family for making her so lonely she couldn’t stand life any more.”
Justin looked down at his plate as if her anger and pain were too private for him to witness. “Maybe they couldn’t have helped her anyway.”
She’d wondered about that herself. Perhaps Mama was just too sad to function in this world. “My grandparents were coming to take care of my mom’s funeral and to take me back with them. But Daddy showed up first. I don’t know how he knew she was gone, but he came. I left with him and never looked back.”
“So where did your dad take you to live?”
“Why are you asking me all these questions? What if I poked around in your past?”
He smiled. “You wouldn’t find anything interesting. I already told you, I lived with my parents and brother mostly in Connecticut. We moved occasionally to cover the slow-aging issue, but stayed on the east coast. When we were kids, my brother and I went to human prep schools for a while. My parents thought it was important for us to socialize with humans so we could understand them better. But later I attended a private Terran school. I understand a little of what you went through living totally among humans. What I found hardest of all as a kid was holding back on the sports field. I wanted to play to win, but I could only use a fraction of my full strength and speed.”
“You should’ve seen me on the basketball court,” Elyse said. “I didn’t hold back. That was before girls played sports, but I wanted to participate so badly I joined in with the boys when they’d let me. They called me ‘the Amazon.’”
“It’s hard being different.” Justin leaned forward, folding his arms on the table and leaning on them. She admired the way the position made his shirt stretch from shoulder to shoulder as if his muscles would rip through the fabric at any moment.
She took another sip of her iced tea. “At least you had family to be a freak with. You had your brother.”
“He died.”
She looked up and caught a fleeting look in Justin’s eyes, but it was gone before she could define it. “I’m sorry.”
“He was older than me. I was still living at home when we got the news Mark had been killed. He was a war correspondent in Korea. That was his cover, but really he was facilitating peace by protecting a Spirit Keeper working with soldiers on the battlefields. Both my brother and Sun Li were blown up by a land mine.”
Justin’s mouth was a thin line and his jaw tight, although his voice didn’t betray any emotion. “Until that point in my life I wasn’t happy about being Terran. I just wanted to be like everyone else. But the day we got the news about Mark something clicked inside me and I finally accepted my purpose. I was a Protector. That’s when I started attending a Terran school and put away my delusions of passing as human.”
Elyse nodded. “I did the same thing, stopped thinking of myself as an outsider and embraced what I was. My dad taught me being a Terran was something to take pride in.”
“It’s about preserving the environment and the five elements,” Justin said. “Your father neglected teaching you that.”
“He taught me about commerce and how to get ahead in the world, how to be strong and take what I want. That’s what being Terran means to me. I helped Daddy run his businesses. He gave me complete control over Le Jardin. I was good at matching clients with their perfect fantasy dates and keeping both the whores and johns in line when they acted up.”
Justin remained silent and Elyse found herself blurting out more, revealing things she’d never shared with anyone. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t stop talking.
“We served a select and wealthy clientele with unique desires. We had exotics—vamps, shifters, fae, Terrans—anything a rich human aware of the paranormal world craved but couldn’t find elsewhere. Our customers paid extremely well for their pleasure.”
She didn’t add that sometimes the clients had been much worse for wear after their encounters with the whores. The vamps in particular occasionally got carried away, leaving drained bodies instead of customers behind.
Justin still didn’t speak and Elyse grew defensive. “Oh, like you’ve never gone to a prostitute in all your, what is it, eighty-some years? You’re no choirboy, Justin.” She smiled at him seductively. “I know what you’re capable of … intimately.”
For a moment their eyes locked. She knew he remembered the bondage and floggings, the prolonged agonies followed by explosive climaxes. A flush crept from his neck into his cheeks and his eyes glittered.
Justin blinked as though breaking out of a spell. “Sexuality isn’t the issue, Elyse. Whatever consenting beings choose to do together is their business. I don’t care that you ran a bordello. It’s your allegiance to a nut case like Ray Brody I have a problem with. Will you stand by when he ruptures the earth or orders his thousands of followers to jump off cliffs into the sea like lemmings? How low will you go to get ahead?”
“Interesting question.” Elyse abruptly pushed back her chair and threw a twenty on the table. “Guess we’ll find out.”
She walked away, listening for Justin to follow. The truth was she didn’t like to dwell too much on what Brody’s ultimate plan for his supporters might be. She functioned better if she went minute by minute.
It wasn’t as if she wanted to hurt anybody. It wasn’t like she didn’t have a heart. But business was business, as her daddy had taught her.
Chapter Six
Justin watched Elyse walk away from him. More precisely, he watched her ass sway seductively from side to side. He knew she wasn’t doing it on purpose. It was just the way she walked. Everything she did was imbued with sexuality. Now that he knew she’d spent some of her formative years in a whorehouse it made a lot of sense.
He’d played it cool around her all day, but hadn’t forgotten what she’d done to him the night before. In fact, every time the memory of the blowjob rose, his cock did the same. He’d sported a hard-on for most of the day. His feelings about Elyse were extremely conflicted—loathing, desire and now pity warred within him.
He tried not to let her confession affect him, but couldn’t help sympathizing with the young girl she’d been—cut off from her own kind and torn between her Keeper mother and Destroyer father. He understood what it meant to be a Terran child, trying to forge friendships with humans, relationships with girls, but never able to reveal his whole self to them. And inevitably the family had to move on so there was no point in caring too much about anyone. Without his family, the world would have been a very lonely place for Justin, too, but damned if he would allow Elyse’s sad childhood to excuse her defection to the side of chaos.
Justin couldn’t afford to feel sorry for her or let her get through his defenses again.
Elyse passed through the restaurant door. The momentary blockage of his view of her ass brought Justin back to his senses. It was time he stopped obsessing about the woman and concentrated on what he was here to accomplish.
These were the facts he could share with KOTE once he’d secured Trina’s freedom. One, Algernon Brody’s box contained nothing of value. Two, Ray had some kind of plan that involved the Wabash fault line and probably entailed making it active. Justin was still no closer to finding out exactly how Ray intended to use his control over his followers. That was the information he needed to get from Elyse next.
As they continued the drive toward Knox County, he thought about his even more important task of rescuing Trina. Once he was inside the retreat center reporting to Brody, he could find her and get her out—assuming that really was where she was being held.
It occurred to him Ian Black knew the layout of the building since he’d escaped from it. Black didn’t like him, so probably wouldn’t share information without grilling him about why he wanted it, but Justin decided to call him anyway, as soon as he could break free of Elyse for a while.
“What exactly are we going to be doing today?” Justin asked after they’d driven for twenty minutes in silence. “Why doesn’t your boss have a real seismologist on the job?”
Elyse shrugged. “Guess he wanted someone with Earth Keeper abilities whom he could trust—that’s me, and some hired muscle to schlep equipment around—that’s you.”
Justin smiled. “You can do your own heavy lifting. You’re as strong as I am. What kind of equipment are we talking about anyway? Your gear doesn’t look that heavy.”
“It’s not; some surveying equipment and a few seismic measuring devices we’ll set up at several places. And we’ll also measure geo-electromagnetic currents and some subtler ley line vibrations with a device from Brody’s science lab. They’ve always got some new gadget.”
She looked at the map lying in her lap. “As a matter of fact, here we are.” She pulled off the road onto the gravel shoulder near a bridge that spanned a shallow ravine.
There was nothing to mark this area as special. It looked exactly like the stretch of Indiana road they’d been traveling for miles. Justin unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the car, stretched his back and walked to the crumbling edge of the drop-off to stare down at the cracked mud in the bottom of the ditch. “Guess it hasn’t rained in a while.”
“Lucky for us. We have to go down there. Come on.”
As Justin had pointed out, the equipment wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward carrying the surveyor’s tripods and other baggage down the steep incline with brambles snagging his clothes and branches whipping his face. By the time they’d reached level ground near the dry streambed, Justin was sweating and irritable. The whole project seemed an exercise in stupidity or, if Brody actually had some device in the works to control the seismic power of Earth, very scary. Once again he cursed his weakness in allowing himself to become a lap dog to the messianic maniac.
Justin glanced at Elyse, the tool of his downfall. She was busily setting up one of the seismic measuring devices. It was unseasonably hot for spring and in the humid heat of the ravine, strands of her auburn curls stuck to her perspiring face. Her cheeks were bright pink and her pale tank top was glued to her chest with sweat, outlining the shape of the dark bra underneath. Even despising her as he did, the sight of her full breasts straining against the fabric set Justin’s pulse racing and stiffened his cock. He was so pathetic.
“Where the hell do you want this set up?” he asked, holding up the tripod.
Elyse straightened, stretching from left to right and cracking her spine as she studied the wild land around them. “Over there. Go about fifty yards downstream just before the bend.”
Justin muttered curses under his breath as he pushed his way through the undergrowth at the edge of the non-existent stream. Finally he got the bright idea to quit struggling with the vegetation and walk down the muddy creek bed.
He had set the tripod in place and was looking through the sight level when the sound of something large crashing through the underbrush came from halfway up the incline to his left. Justin had time for one inane thought—Are there bears in Indiana?—before a very human figure emerged from the trees and bushes. Justin’s inner radar instantly recognized him as Terran.
“Hey.” Justin half-raised his hand in greeting.
The man had broad, linebacker shoulders, dark hair and a heavy moustache hiding his upper lip. He wore a muscle shirt, cargo shorts and heavy work boots, and carried a large duffle. “What are you doing here?” He looked as surprised as Justin felt.
“Who wants to know?” Justin countered. The hair at his nape bristled at the antagonistic posture of the other man. He wasn’t too good at sensing the evil aura that marked Destroyers, and sure as hell hadn’t recognized Elyse as one, although in hindsight he realized she’d sent out palpable vibes, but he knew instinctively this Terran was bad news.
The moustached man clenched a fist at his side. His eyes narrowed as they focused on the tripod. “Who are you working for?”
Before Justin could reply, a second man emerged from the woods, carrying tripods in his arms. The new guy had a pale crew cut through which his pink scalp shone in the sunlight. He was as beefy as his partner and looked just as surprised and pissed off to find someone there.
“What the hell is this?” the new man on the scene called out to his partner as he leaned the equipment against a tree and stood in a defensive posture, ready to back up his partner if a fight started.
“Whoever you’re working for, clear out,” the first man snarled, setting his bag on the ground. Metallic clinking from inside confirmed Justin’s suspicion that the bag carried some kind of gear rather than, say, a dead body.
Justin waited, limbs loose but poised to spring into action if the situation escalated to physical violence. “Looks like we’re on the same job. Who’s your boss?”
“None of your damn business. Get the fuck on your way!” The crew cut guy’s ridge of heavy eyebrows gave him a Neanderthal look. Justin sensed he’d be the one more likely to hit first and ask questions later.
“What’s going on?” Elyse’s voice came from several yards behind Justin. He felt her presence at his left shoulder as she approached.
The man with the moustache and the muscle shirt scanned Elyse’s body with assessing eyes. He gave a slight nod as if acknowledging her as one of his kind. “We’re on assignment for Brody. You?”
“The same,” Elyse said. “Why would Brody send two teams? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t matter,” his partner said. “Our orders are straight from the boss. We’ve got work to do and you’re in the way.”
The Neanderthal suddenly took a swing at Justin.
The unexpected roundhouse punch took Justin by surprise, but he snapped his head back at the last instant so he only caught a glancing blow on the jaw. Still, the strength of the man’s blow sent him stumbling backward.
Elyse launched herself past Justin, kicking out and catching Crew Cut with a foot to the chest, knocking him back.
His partner sprang into action, hitting Elyse in the face as she regained her balance from her high kick.
Justin didn’t see what happened next. His assailant surged toward him again, raining down blows on his face and body. Justin deflected most of them, then got in a few jabs of his own, landing a solid punch to the other man’s stomach. It was like hitting solid rock and sent shockwaves up his arm. Soon Justin and the Neanderthal were rolling on the ground in the muck of the creek bed, viciously jabbing at one another.
His opponent’s strength matched Justin’s own, telling him this was the Destroyer counterpart of a Protector. The guy was bodyguard material and it didn’t make a lot of sense that he was on a fact-finding scientific expedition, but Justin didn’t really have time to ponder it. Crew Cut suddenly upped the ante, drawing a knife from a sheath hidden on his body.
Justin rolled to the side as Crew Cut drove the weapon into the earth right beside his head. By the time the man had pulled the blade out of the ground, Justin was on his feet, crouched and ready for him.
He stabbed at Justin, and the blade missed by a whisper. Justin feinted right then left, spinning out of the blade’s arc. He kicked a leg out, knocking his opponent’s arm upward and sending the blade flying from his hand. It landed several yards away. Both men scrambled to get to it first.
Justin would rather have settled the fight with fists than weapons, but when he got a grip on the smooth knife handle, h
e didn’t hesitate to grasp it and drive it into his opponent’s shoulder.
The man cried out and pulled back, the knife sticking out of his body. It must not have hit anything vital because he grasped the blade and pulled it out with a grunt. Crew Cut glared at Justin, then ran toward him with the knife clutched in his fist.
Justin jumped aside as the man barreled past him.
“Hold it! Stop!” the man with the moustache bellowed. He stood with his hands up in the air, palms out.
Elyse crouched in front of him, her chest heaving, blood streaming from her nose. Her hair was a tangled, coppery mass.
Justin looked back to his opponent. Crew Cut, too, had halted at his partner’s command.
“I’m not going to piss Brody off killing somebody without his say-so,” Moustache said. “Before this goes any farther, let’s get it sorted out by the boss.”
“Fine.” Elyse panted. “I’ll give him a call right now.”
“No. I will.” Moustache reached a hand into his pants pocket.
“Hold it!” Elyse straightened, holding her hands out in a warning gesture. “Take it out slowly.”
Moustache nodded, took his time pulling out the cell phone, then pressed a number.
The rest of them remained frozen in their strange tableau, watching and waiting.
“Sir, sorry to bother you. We’re here. The problem is so are two others. They said you sent them.” He paused, listening.
Elyse held out her hand. “Let me talk to him.”
Moustache stepped back, scowling at her. “What are your names?”
“Tell him, it’s Elyse and Justin Foster. Give me the damn phone and let me talk to him.” Elyse held out her hand and snapped her fingers.
“Elyse and Justin Foster.” He repeated it into the phone. “Yes. Uh-huh. Yes, sir.” Without giving her a chance to talk, Moustache cut off the call by snapping the phone closed. “Mr. Brody offers his apologies and says to carry on. This was all a big misunderstanding.” The man sounded as if he was reciting word for word what he’d been told to say.