***
Ran-Del had managed to keep sleeping in the hospital bed, even after Francesca had dismissed the medtechs, simply by telling Francesca that he slept better in it. She had agreed to keep it, but she had the bed moved to their suite. Ran-Del hadn’t been able to come up with a reason not to move the bed, so he had slept every night in the same room as Francesca, all the while ignoring her tentative suggestions for more intimate contact.
He knew she was disappointed, but he couldn’t bring himself to contemplate prolonging physical contact in the way she wanted. He debated again about telling her what had happened, but still decided against it. He wasn’t sure how she would react, especially since he couldn’t be close to her without her thoughts seeping into his. He kept to himself as much as possible and made plans to walk to the forest—mapping out a route, counting his remaining cash, and making note of a store where he could buy supplies.
He was almost ready to put his plan in motion, but he felt a need to test himself. He would run hard to the other side of the city and back. If he made it, then he would leave the next day.
It was a workday for Francesca. Ran-Del called her on the com set. He had come to appreciate the com, because it transmitted absolutely no whiff of thought or emotion.
“What is it?” She sounded cross. Ran-Del could see that she was busy. Antonio hovered at her elbow, intent on some detail of her schedule.
“I’m going out into the city,” Ran-Del said. “You asked me always to tell you.”
She pursed her lips for a second before she answered. “I thought you were staying in today?”
“I’m feeling cooped up. I won’t be gone more than a few hours.”
“Whom are you taking with you?”
Ran-Del had learned how to check the duty roster. “Merced and Pagiani.”
“Where are you going?” Francesca asked next.
“I told you—into the city.” It always annoyed him when she tried to pin him down so precisely.
“All right.” Francesca cut the connection almost before the words were out of her mouth.
Merced was waiting in the security booth by the gate when Ran-Del approached with Buster. The woman next to him was Arlene Pagiani; she was petite, coming no higher than Ran-Del’s shoulder, but she was very well muscled, and was the terror of the practice room at hand to hand combat.
“Headed anywhere special, Ran-Del?” Merced asked, noting the dog’s presence. Janis had refused to allow him in her bar.
“No, Eduardo,” Ran-Del said, as they stepped through the gate. “I just want to wander. Let’s head to the river and then follow it.”
Ran-Del set the pace, running quickly. He felt really good today, very like his old self. There was no sense of strain or weakness.
After an hour, Ran-Del could sense Merced’s distress, and he slowed his pace, and then dropped to a walk. “Are you all right, Eduardo?”
“I’m fine,” Merced said, breathing heavily. “I can keep going if you want.”
Ran-Del shook his head. He could take a break, but it felt good to be back in shape and not need one. He walked over to the water’s edge and stood looking down at the barges that were making their way up and down the river. Small blue and green day bats swooped down near one barge where a man threw food scraps into the water. The little animals caught the food in the air and flew off to their nests to eat it. Buster stuck his head through the railing to watch them, his quick blue tongue darting from his mouth as if he were licking his lips in anticipation.
“That’s illegal,” Pagiani said indignantly. “They’re supposed to wait and recycle it in the usual way.”
“Going to have a cop on each bridge, Arlene?” Merced sounded cynical.
“They’re beautiful day bats,” Ran-Del said, wishing he could move away from the two guards, but they always stayed close on either side of him. “I never saw any that color before. What are they called?”
Pagiani shrugged. “Who knows? You have to watch out when you’re standing underneath one. That’s all I know about day bats.”
“Threshers,” Merced said unexpectedly. “Mostly they live on the plains and eat seeds from the wild grasses. They clip off the stalks and pick the seeds out with their claws.”
Ran-Del was surprised. “Are you interested in animals, Eduardo?”
Merced looked noncommittal. “Not that much. But I grew up on a farm.”
Ran-Del answered absently. Something was troubling him. He couldn’t tell what it was for several minutes. He stood over the water watching the boats and tried to determine what was bothering him.
Finally, he concluded it was his psy sense. It wasn’t at all like he had felt before he was attacked. There was no sense of being a target, no feeling of physical danger, but still, something was wrong, something bad was about to happen.
It would be best to head back to the compound. His test was adequate. He knew he could make it to the forest. He didn’t say anything to either of the others, but merely called Buster to heel. His escort followed him without argument as he started back toward the Hayden complex at a brisk run.
They made it in record time. Merced was panting again when they got back to the front gate. Once they were in the compound, he and Pagiani were officially off bodyguard duty. The woman trotted back toward the security barracks, but Merced stood bent over, catching his breath, and called after Ran-Del.
“Hey, Ran-Del,” he shouted. “Do me a favor and let me know next time you’re going out. I’ll arrange to take leave.”
Ran-Del waved a hand but didn’t stop as he headed back toward the house. He sent Buster off to the kennels with a voice command, and kept going by himself.
The closer he got to the front door, the worse it got. Could it be another attack on the House? The sense of ominous gloom weighed heavier and heavier on his shoulders. Ran-Del slowed as he neared the front door, and then turned to take the side door that led to the staff wing. The feeling eased a little as Ran-Del let himself into the house.
He stood at the end of the corridor and debated what he should do. A man came out of one of the rooms at the far end of the corridor, and Ran-Del recognized Antonio Vanderloo, Francesca’s assistant, who shared an apartment with his wife and two children. Antonio stopped and turned to say something to someone still in the room.
Impelled by his sense of dread, Ran-Del ducked behind a set of draperies. He felt very foolish, but at the same time, he didn’t want Antonio to see him wandering the halls of the staff quarters.
“I don’t know,” Antonio said, his voice barely audible in the distance.
Ran-Del moved the draperies and saw the assistant dart a quick glance at either end of the corridor, as if he were making sure it was empty. Antonio stepped closer to the door and spoke again. “She told me,” garbled sounds, “break for an hour.” More garbled sounds, “… if she had something going with this guy” … “slept with half the city before … married.” The rest of it was indecipherable.
Apparently the person still in the room said something but Ran-Del couldn’t hear it at all.
“Oh, all right,” Antonio said, more loudly. “I’ll go see if they’re still there.”
Ran-Del waited soundlessly as Antonio turned away from him and headed the other direction toward the main wing of the house. He didn’t see Ran-Del at all.
The Sansoussy stood frozen, thinking over the implications of Antonio’s speech. Francesca had sent Antonio away during working hours. Francesca wasn’t a Sansoussy, and didn’t think of marriage in the same way he did. Francesca was with a man.
Ran-Del began to walk slowly down the corridor, getting angrier by the second. Finally, he stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath in an effort to control his fury. He wasn’t entirely successful. He was about to start the mantra for the First Discipline, but when he opened his eyes he realized he was standing in front of Nisa’s former suite where he had slept for so many nights, and he realized why he had come this way.
He o
pened the suite door and went straight to the bedroom. The lock on the mirror frame opened easily. As soon as Ran-Del stepped into the hidden passage, lights came on. He followed it for several meters, took a small flight of steps, a couple of turns, more stairs, and then walked a long straight stretch. At last the passage ended in a small, square space with a narrow door and an access panel. He placed his palm to the panel and waited.
The door slid open silently.
Ran-Del stepped into the room, then stopped dead. Francesca stood by their bed, locked in an embrace with a tall, fair-haired man whose back was to Ran-Del. His hands were inside her blouse, and she was pulling his shirt over his shoulders. They were kissing passionately, oblivious to Ran-Del’s presence. Francesca’s hair had come down, and spilled around her shoulders, just as it always did when she and Ran-Del made love.
Rage consumed Ran-Del. It flowed over him in an angry tide, blotting out all his senses—his perceptions of their passion, the sounds they made. Even the light in the room seemed to dim from his fury. Ran-Del crossed the room in two long, furious strides. He wasn’t conscious of drawing his dirk but somehow it was in his hand.
Francesca saw him first. Her eyes flew open, and she opened her mouth to scream a warning to her companion. Ran-Del pulled the man away from her, then grabbed him by the throat in a one-handed grip. Taken by surprise, the man’s first reaction was anger; Ran-Del perceived quite clearly his intention to bluster, to demand an accounting for this crude behavior, but Ran-Del’s grip was too tight to allow him to speak. Then he saw the knife, and Ran-Del could feel fear flow from him, like scent from a crushed tea vine.
“Ran-Del!” Francesca cried, “Ran-Del, please, don’t kill him!”
Her words frightened the man even more; his terror seemed to Ran-Del to fill the room. Francesca grasped Ran-Del’s arm, and Ran-Del could feel her fear, too. After a moment, he was surprised to realize that she was terrified not for herself or for the stranger—she was afraid for him.
“Please, Ran-Del,” she pleaded. “Please, don’t kill him! He’s with the Wong-Reilly cartel. They’ll demand your death, and I might not be able to bargain. Please, Ran-Del, let him go!”
Ran-Del’s head reeled as their thoughts and emotions flooded his mind at the same time that he was feeling such intense anger of his own. He backed away from Francesca and slammed the fair-haired man against the wall. He kept his grip on the man’s throat and held his dirk to the terrified stranger’s bare chest. “Give me a reason not to kill him!”
“We didn’t do anything,” Francesca said, hovering frantically. “I slept with him a few times, three seasons ago, but we didn’t do anything this time. I swear I won’t see him again, Ran-Del. Just let him go, please?”
“You’d be in bed with him by now if I hadn’t come in,” Ran-Del almost spat out the words. He pressed the tip of his knife into the man’s flesh just enough to make him bleed freely. A small line of red trickled down the man’s chest onto his stomach and then to his trousers.
“Maybe I would have been,” Francesca said, half sobbing and half accusing, “but I’m not. Besides, you have no right to be angry about it. You did the same thing to me.”
She thought she was speaking the truth. She truly believed that he had been unfaithful. Ran-Del dragged the tip of his knife farther down the stranger’s chest to make a shallow cut about fifteen centimeters long.
“If you touch my wife again,” Ran-Del said, staring into the stranger’s sweating face, “I’ll make the cut deeper and rip your heart from your body. Now get out!”
Ran-Del swung the other man by the throat, and dragged him to the door. The man gasped for air as Ran-Del pressed the access panel for the door to the sitting room. He almost threw the stranger through the doorway. The man landed on the sitting room floor with a heavy thud and lay, gasping and groaning, as the door slid shut. Ran-Del thumbed the door lock and turned back to Francesca.
She was watching him intently. Her fear had turned to anger. “You have no right to come in here and act like that! You might easily have killed him.”
“I would’ve killed him,” Ran-Del said, “except that I could tell you weren’t lying. Why would you think that I had betrayed you?”
Francesca closed her mouth in an angry frown and then immediately opened it again to shout at him. “Why do I think you’re fooling around on me? Maybe because we haven’t made love in weeks. Maybe because you avoid me when you can, and ignore me when you can’t. You won’t sleep in the same bed—you won’t even let me touch you!” She stopped for a moment, and swallowed hard.
“I remember our betrothal—until death shall part us, your great-grandfather said. Well that happened, Ran-Del. You died. Maybe you think that lets you off the hook. You spend all your time in that bar with that woman who looks at you like you were a glass of water and she was lost in the desert. Don’t you dare lie to me, Ran-Del Jahanpur!”
“I never lied to you, and I never slept with Janis.”
Francesca gave a derisive snort and folded her arms across her chest. “When we were first betrothed,” she said, her voice as cold as her thoughts were hot, “you never went more than two nights in a row without wanting to make love. It’s been thirty-nine days, and you’ve pushed me away every time I tried to get close. Why would you do that—how could you do that—unless you had something going with someone else?”
“There is no one. I never slept with anyone else in my life except for you. Can you say that?”
“No,” Francesca snapped. “You know perfectly well I can’t. I was honest about that before we married. But I haven’t gone to bed with anyone except you since the day we were betrothed.”
“Until today.”
Francesca became conscious that her blouse was completely open. She wrapped it around her and tucked it into her trousers. “Today I got fed up,” she said, her voice dripping the same bitterness that radiated in her thoughts. “You went off again, with hardly a word to me. When Preston Sandoval came to see me about a deal for our surplus canvas crop, he started to flirt. I let it go a little farther. I never thought you’d come back and turn into some kind of jealous maniac. If you don’t want me, why can’t I find someone who does?”
“I never said I didn’t want you.” Ran-Del took a deep breath. She was being truthful. She hadn’t planned to be unfaithful, nor had she expected him to return.
“Then why have you changed toward me?” Francesca demanded. “Why haven’t you touched me—literally not touched me—in over a month?”
He had to tell her. No matter how badly she took the news, it was better than her thinking he had been disloyal. “Something happened to me after the attack.”
She wrinkled her brow. He could tell she wasn’t sure of his meaning. “Are you ill?”
“I recovered my health completely. It’s not that I’m ill—I’m—I'm different.”
“How do you mean different?” Francesca said insistently. She wanted to believe him, but so far his explanation had confused her. “What’s different about you? You seem just the same except you don’t want to touch me anymore.”
“I don’t want to touch anyone.” Ran-Del took a deep breath and tried to find the right words. “If I touch someone, I can’t shut him out of my head. It’s as if my psy sense expanded suddenly—exploded, almost. Instead of just emanations from people’s emotions, now I can sense everything—what they feel, what they think—and not just people I know.”
She was hopeful but skeptical. Ran-Del could see it in her pose as clearly as in her thoughts. “You mean you can see into my mind now?” she said.
“Yes. When I’m close, I can tell what you’re thinking.” He paused for a second to explore the images he saw. “You’re remembering the last time we made love. You thought of it as a test, just to see if I was telling the truth.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed with alarm. “You can tell exactly what I’m thinking?”
“If I’m near enough, it’s hard to shut you out. If you—if
anyone—touches me, their thoughts become a flood washing over me. I can’t keep them out.”
She took a step closer. “And that’s really why you haven’t wanted to make love?”
“Yes. That’s the real reason.” He tossed his knife onto the bedside table. “Why were you afraid for me, Francesca?”
“What?” she asked, uncomprehending. Her mind was still reeling from the shock.
Ran-Del could feel her relief mixed with fear. She was happy but frightened of the change in him. “When I had that miserable excuse for a man by the throat, you were afraid, but it wasn’t for him and it wasn’t for yourself. You were afraid for me.”
She looked vaguely uncomfortable. “I thought you were going to kill him. If you had—if you had—”
Her tension came across as an excited edginess, mixed with remembered concern. She had been afraid he would kill her lover and suffer the consequences. She had worried more about what would happen to him if he killed Preston Sandoval than about the possibility of Sandoval dying. She loved him.
Ran-Del stepped closer and deliberately put one hand on Francesca’s shoulder. The warmth of her thoughts was so overwhelming, his whole body shuddered. He could sense compassion, great tenderness, intense longing. He saw himself as Francesca saw him—someone exciting and incomprehensible, someone who aroused her emotionally as well as physically. Ran-Del felt his own desire stir and then leap to a frenzy. He pulled her close against him and found that the strength of his own passions helped to mute his perception of hers.
When he put his arms around her, Francesca put her head up to study his face.
“Is it all right?” she asked.
“Yes.” It was more than all right. When Ran-Del kissed her, he could no longer sort out the source of what he felt. His thoughts and hers mixed inside him in a chaotic swirl of desire, concern, and affection.
Francesca seemed to be almost equally swept away. A second later, the door chimed in gently muted tones. Francesca broke off the kiss and said a single angry word.
“I beg your pardon, Baroness?” Marina Quinn’s voice said politely through the speaker.
“Go away!” Francesca ordered.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Baroness,” Quinn’s voice said, “but a gentleman out here says that your husband nearly killed him. He has a minor wound,” there was the sound of protest in the background, “a minor wound,” Quinn repeated firmly, “but for your own safety, I must ask you to open this door.”
“I’m quite safe,” Francesca said. “You can tell Citizen Sandoval that we’ll pay damages. Tell him to see me—tell him to call me tomorrow.”
After a brief silence, the door chimed again.
“I told you to go away, Quinn,” Francesca said.
“The gentleman has agreed to leave,” Quinn’s voice said. “However, I must insist that you open the door, Baroness Hayden.”
“You can have my voice prints analyzed for stress,” Francesca said. “I’m not lying. I’m quite safe, and if you try to open that door, you’re fired.”
Ran-Del took Francesca in his arms again and pulled open her blouse. Francesca gave a small moan of pleasure as he bent his head down and kissed her breasts. Quinn’s voice distracted him from the moment.
“We’re going now, Baroness,” Quinn said. Ran-Del thought he could detect amusement in the security chief’s voice. “Please remember,” Quinn added, “that the alarm system is now active, and any screams will be interpreted as a request for assistance.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Francesca said with a gasp. “Now go away!”
There was no answer. Ran-Del laid Francesca down on their bed. She pulled him down on top of her, and he could feel desire rising from her as palpably as heat rose from a fire. Her passion swallowed him up, and Ran-Del didn’t fight it. He felt what she felt, and her thoughts echoed in his head. He knew what she wanted as soon as she did, and he felt her response to his touch just as she experienced it.
When it was over, Ran-Del finally pulled away, unable to bear further contact.
Francesca pulled the bedclothes around her and clung to her edge of the bed studying him anxiously. “Are you all right, Ran-Del?”
He could still feel her concern, even in the midst of the glow of satisfaction. “Yes. But I need to go to my grandfather. I need to learn how to control this new gift, before I go insane.”
She nodded. His talent worried her. “I think that’s a good idea. I can have a flyter take you there tomorrow.”
Ran-Del propped himself up on one elbow. “I don’t want to go by flyter. I want to run there and back. I know it’ll take a long time because I’m still not as strong as I should be, but I need the time alone. These last weeks have been—very difficult for me. I need to be alone with no other minds crowding mine.”
She was reluctant, but she could see the logic of it. “All right. But why don’t you take an escort until you’re out of the city? You can take a portable com, too, and pack what you need from the kitchens so you don't have to stop to hunt.”
She was thinking of their sojourn on the plains when they had been chained together physically as he now felt linked mentally. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth, a fleeting touch that brought another rush of tenderness and concern from her.
“When will you start?” she asked when he pulled away.
He glanced at the window to study the sky. “I have to make preparations. I’ll start first thing tomorrow.”
Francesca sat up, still wrapped up in the bedclothes. “All right, Ran-Del.” She cocked her head and looked at him. “What do I say if they call from that place where you used to work?”
“Say I’ve gone back to the forest for a few weeks. I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay, Francesca. I’ve never had to do this before.”
Francesca looked solemn. “Take as long as you need, Ran-Del. Just be sure you come back to me in the end.”
“I will.” He knew it was true.
The Sixth Discipline Page 81