Sharing The Darkness

CHAPTER THREE

The sky flared as lightning bull-whipped across the sky and the resultant thunder sounded like the drums of fate, deep and heavy, reverberating with promise…or threat.

The rental Buick slid sideways and despite Melanie’s frantic attempts to correct the spin by turning the wheel in the opposite direction, it continued its revolution. She felt low brush scraping the side of the car, scratching it but also cushioning it, preventing it from going any farther afield. Almost luckily, the car died.

For a dazed moment Melanie found herself still trying to turn the wheel, still trying to see through the sheet of oppressive rain to the narrow track that made up the road to Teo Sandoval’s hideaway. When she finally realized the car wasn’t moving, that the only sounds she could hear were the rain, wind and total silence of the Buick, she had to fight the desire to simply sink onto the seat and cry herself to sleep.

But she couldn’t allow herself that luxury. If she fell asleep now, she felt she might never wake up. Her one hope was somewhere up that road and no amount of rain, thunder or even dark, possibly animal-laden, woods was going to prevent her from attempting to enlist his aid. Surely he would turn them back out into the night, into a raging thunderstorm. Reclusive he might be, but surely not inhumane.

If she told herself that often enough, she thought, she might actually start to believe it. Especially if she ignored the utter rejection and wariness she’d read in his eyes, the tension rippling through his broad shoulders. And if she forced herself to forget the photographs of the PRI’s demolished building, the stark recommendation of the PRI psychiatrist that Teo Sandoval be left alone at all costs.

Taking a deep breath, she gathered Chris from the back seat, fastening him in his waterproof coat and hood. As luck would have it, by the time she managed to drag on her own light parka, the furious rain had abated to a fine drizzle, although the sharp, angry wind whipping the tall pines to creaking protest sent what rain there was directly into her eyes.

She held Chris against her shoulder with one hand and tried focusing the flashlight on the muddy road with the other.

“Hold on to me, Chris,” she said, hitching him higher.

“Dance, Mommy,” Chris chirruped.

Melanie knew he meant he wanted his toys to accompany them, but she wished he could make her dance right then, make them both as seemingly weightless as his ever-present entourage of floating objects. Her son had never seemed heavier than at this moment with her feet slithering in the mud, her body shaking from cold and exhaustion.

But at least one of them could mentally escape the arduous trek. “Okay, honey. Dance all you want,” she said wearily.

Another flash of lightning blinded her momentarily, but it seemed farther away now, higher up the mountain. Unfortunately, that was exactly where she was heading. She paused for a moment, catching her breath, and shifted Chris to her other arm.

Even in the dark, she could see his toys in the air right in front of them, unaffected by the wind or the drizzle. Chris’s entire focus was on them, rendering him blissfully oblivious to the discomforts of their journey up the mountain. She reflected, not for the first time, that in many ways the PRI had given him a precious gift, that while they may have been frustrated and angered by his ability to close them out, his complete concentration was more a blessing than a detriment. It spared him what his mother couldn’t escape.

She resumed her difficult hike, and soon had fallen into a shambling rhythm, thinking not of the man up ahead, not daring to hope he could be persuaded to help her son—and her. Instead she found herself remembering the early days at the PRI, the lavish meals, the hushed and awed voices of the scientists. Those days had been bright with hope, tense with anticipation. They had also been before she’d discovered the murderous intentions behind their every gift.

Then her thoughts drifted to her former husband, and she again remembered the look on Tom’s face when he’d fled from her, from Chris and his unruly powers. The oddly definite final glance he’d shot her as he’d accepted the payment for revealing Chris’s unusual nature to the driven scientists, for signing away his half of their custodial rights.

She had blamed him bitterly when he’d left them two years ago, had hated him when she saw that cowardly defiance in his greedy face. But she’d never despised him as much as she did at this particular moment, trudging up a muddy hillside in the dark. On the run from the men to whom he’d nearly succeeded in selling his son.

But the two weeks of desperately seeking Teo Sandoval had helped to blur Tom’s features, crystallize his personality. She knew now that he’d always been a runner, fleeing at the first sign of difficulty, quitting jobs that were too demanding, leaving towns that seemed too judgmental. Though she hadn’t known it until long after they’d been married he’d abandoned his first wife and daughter, so was it all that surprising that he would turn tail and run at the first sign of Chris’s stringless mobile? And how could she not have expected a man who constantly sought get-rich-quick schemes to eventually try to sell his own flesh and blood for the proverbial handful of silver?

Nonetheless, she still felt the deep pain of the betrayal just as she’d felt it when Tom had left. Then, she’d only considered the abrupt cessation of sharing responsibilities, decisions. But now, thanks to him, she was trekking up a backwoods mountain road that had been turned to sliding mud by a freak prewinter rain and seeking aid from a man who could destroy as easily as he could help her, from a man who had already told her to leave, whose eyes had underscored the dangers he’d warned her about.

For a brief moment exhaustion overcame her and she stopped, considering turning back, running elsewhere, seeking asylum in some far away region. But then she smiled bitterly. No place was far enough from the PRI to be truly safe. If they could track her by no other means, they would use their stable of psychics to find her. Chris’s mother knew too much about them. She suspected even more. They couldn’t let her escape and possibly expose them. Her dreams, while perplexing, still revealed enough for her to understand that their conceived end justified any means. And those dreams told her clearly that the PRI would stop at nothing, because no one—with the possible exception of Teo Sandoval—was as powerful a telekinetic as her son. They wanted him, and would do whatever it took to get him.

She shivered, thinking of how they would pervert Chris’s innocent dancing abilities. She heard a crackling rustle in the nearby trees and swiftly darted the flashlight over the brush on her left. She saw no animal, no human, but the light wildly strafing the tree branches, the low scrub oak, somehow frightened her. It clearly revealed how terribly alone she was on this muddy road, how utterly defenseless.

Startled into action, she continued her journey. Half running, trying desperately not to slip and fall in the cold mud, and clinging to Chris with all her might, Melanie staggered up the rough trail, not even bothering to try to use her flashlight as a guide.

She was almost stunned when she realized she was no longer running nearly straight uphill, but had leveled out some twenty feet ago. She had reached the apex of the mountain and now stood in a huge, broad, night-darkened clearing.

No house broke the line of her vision, and tall, imposing cliffs rose high above an inky black horizon. The black could only mean one thing: the land dropped off sharply. She and her son were standing on what felt like the very edge of the world. Beyond the clearing on her left were a series of small, craggy hills that dropped sharply, leveling out to form the cliff edge. And judging by the width of the black strip, the cliff hovered above an abyss that might cut through the very heart of these mountains.

Had the gas station attendant knowingly sent a woman and baby to a wrong location? Was he, even now, behind her on that treacherous road somewhere? Or had she taken a wrong turn, gone right instead of left? Surely he’d said take the first dirt road to her left?

Tears of frustration, fear and abject despair stung her eyes. She blinked them back determindly. If she started crying now, she might never stop.

Just then lightning arrowed across the sky and illuminated the clearing, revealing the harsh face of the rock wall beyond the abyss, and the craggy hills facing her. Incredibly, the lightning also revealed a pair of massive wooden doors set into the lowest of the rocky hills that descended to the cliff edge.

Dear God, she thought. He lives in a cave?

Small flashes of lightning continued to flicker from behind heavy clouds, lighting the clearing with red, gold and blue flares. And still Melanie stood staring at the imposing set of doors, the narrow portal that stretched in front of them.

She looked back over her shoulder at the dark, muddy road she’d traversed to get to this spot. It looked even more imposing and dangerous from this vantage point than it had coming up.

Drawing a deep breath of the misting air, she told herself that she’d come this far, she wasn’t about to turn back now. She needed Teo Sandoval’s help. And nothing was going to make her leave without pleading her case before him. Nothing.

She straightened her aching shoulders, ignored her icy-cold and muddy feet, and pushed her sodden hair from her face. Crossing the twenty or thirty yards leading to the set of wooden doors, she knew how Puss ‘N Boots must have felt, or Beauty upon reaching the Beast’s castle—utterly terrified and equally determined not to show it.

All too quickly Melanie reached the narrow portal heralding the doors. She stepped up two wooden steps and crossed the rough planking after pausing to scrape some of the mud from her shoes. Chris’s toys stayed in midair at her side, as unaffected as ever by Melanie’s tension, the wind, the misting rain or the lightning. Would the sight of the toys affect Teo Sandoval’s decision to help her? Or would it make him even more determined that she leave without his aid?

She hiked Chris up and closer, tucking him securely beneath her head, cradling him, as much for her own security as his. Then she rapped on the massive doors. Her knuckles against the heavy wood made about as much noise as a whisper in a crowded room.

Using the flat edge of her fist, she pounded the door in a repeated series of three loud bangs. No one answered. Teo Sandoval didn’t appear. She waited for a few seconds, then redoubled her efforts. Still no answer.

She stood irresolutely for about a minute, not knowing what to do. She had focused so thoroughly on the trek to get here that she’d never once considered what she would do if he was either not at home or refused to answer his door. If, indeed, this even proved to be his home.

On the portal was a rough, hand-hewn bench and after a few seconds spent staring blankly at it, Melanie realized she was eyeing it as a place to spend the night. Nothing on earth was going to drive her back down that road, and no matter how cold it might get during the night, at least the portal offered some protection from the rain. And she could confront Teo Sandoval by the light of day.

A creak beside her made her turn. One of the massive doors slowly, ominously, swung outward. As dark as it was outside, she would have expected light from inside to spill across the floor of the portal, but instead, in some strange optical illusion, it appeared to her that the dark from the inside snaked out, spreading across the wooden planks, seemingly defying the laws of physics and filling the already shadowed portal.

It appeared no one stood behind that open door, and Melanie found herself holding her breath. No more, she thought. She could take no more.

“What do you want?” a gruff voice asked, the tone menacing.

Melanie couldn’t seem to speak. Now that the moment was at hand she felt that nothing on earth could persuade her to enter this strange and forbidding dwelling, if indeed, dwelling it was.

Chris stirred in her arms, one baby hand sliding upward to cup her lips. Automatically she pressed a kiss into that tiny palm. The simple gesture, the sheer banality, the sweet honesty of a mother’s kiss for her beloved child, steadied her as nothing else could have done.

She’d come so far, so desperately, and now she was actually in the company of the one man who could possibly make the universe spin correctly again. She couldn’t leave. Not now.

The shadows in the doorway, strengthened by flickering lightning and elongated by the unseen mountains looming above the house, shifted and realigned, and Melanie realized that Teo Sandoval had stepped into the open doorway and was standing not three feet in front of her, watching her closely.

His dark hair, long and as black as the night, blended with the shadows, as did his swarthy face and dark clothing. But she could easily see his odd, pale blue-gray eyes and knew he was studying her intensely even as he didn’t reveal a single clue to his own thoughts.

She needed him so much, had sought him out for so long, that she felt tears prick her eyes. Don’t make me do this, she wanted to tell him. Don’t make me beg.

“You have to help me,” she said abruptly, and only realized—after she’d closed her mouth—that she hadn’t voiced it as a plea, but as a rough command.

She clung to his gaze as if his remarkable eyes were the only thing between her and drowning. Again she felt that brush of his inner self, if not his thoughts. Alone, he seemed to project at her, not as a state of mind, but rather as a state of permanent being. Searching quickly, lightly, she intuited no hint of self-pity or despair, only fact, unequivocal and unconditional.

She swiftly closed the tenuous bridge between them, sealing him off, not willing to let this powerful telepathic and telekinetic man know the full extent of her desperation, the need that had been housed in her so long it felt perfectly at home in her. The depth of that need had nothing to do with Chris, nothing to do with the PRI, but she knew if she opened to him, he would read it all.

She’d read the files on him. She knew he could pluck any thought, any emotion, from an unblocked mind. Without leaded hood, no human being was closed to him. Except her. Her own skills made it possible to close herself off to him.

But it was tempting to let him see what the PRI would do to her son. Surely that would turn the tide in her favor. Surely he would be unable to refuse helping her if he knew.

After a timeless moment or two his expression shifted, as did his body. For a split second his image hung in the air—a dream, an unsmiling Cheshire cat, face wary, eyes shuttered—then he melted back into the shadows.

“Don’t!” she called swiftly.

“Don’t what, señora?” he asked. His tone mocked her.

“Don’t send us away,” she said.

“I told you not to come, that I help no one,” he said.

“I had to,” she said fiercely. “There isn’t anyone else I can turn to.”

“You came to the wrong man, señora,” he stated flatly, and at that moment Melanie believed him. But belief didn’t dampen her need for his help, her determination to enlist it.

“The PRI is trying to take my son away from me. They mean to use him like they did you. You can’t let them do this. You can’t be that cruel.”

“I can be anything I wish, señora.” His voice was as cold as the night and twice as dark. “And as ‘cruel’ as I choose to be. Now get out. And don’t ever come back.”

Then he swung the heavy door shut.

Melanie stared at that blank, imposing door for a few seconds, feeling the blood drain from her face, the determination ebb from her heart. What kind of a man was he? How could he refuse to help a baby, a child like he must have been? How could he turn her away so callously? She dropped her guard one notch, but swiftly shut it again as she felt him questing at her mind, attempting to storm it with his anger, his own determination to break through her mental barriers.

A deep rage began to seethe in her, infusing her veins with righteousness, her mind with a nearly blinding fury. How dared he.

She lifted her fist to the door and furiously pounded, no polite series of timid thuds this time, but a frenzied demand for his return. The doors remained shut. Melanie kicked at them, yelling as she did so.

“I’ll stay here—” kick “—and I’ll sleep on your damned bench—” kick “—until we die of starvation—” kick “—but I am not going back down that mudslide you have for a road—!” kick, kick “—I am not taking my son back out into the night, into the rain! Open this door!”

She lashed her foot out at the door for a final savage kick and met no resistance.

Pale eyes glittered at her either in extreme anger or some other equally intense emotion. Melanie tried stilling her ragged breathing, her too rapid heartbeat. She felt her own anger draining from her as swiftly as it had risen. For the first time since stepping onto his wooden portal, she felt pierced by the cold, exhausted by her journey up the mountain.

“Please,” she whispered.

“How did you get here?” he asked her harshly.

She stared at him blankly. “What difference does that make?” she asked aloud, but inside she was wondering what he might do to the gas-station attendant who had directed them up this strange mountain.

A bolt of lightning razored across the clearing, bathing the portal in blue light tinged with purple. The entire world seemed infused with ozone. Melanie flinched, but didn’t make a sound, didn’t take her eyes from the silver-blue gaze before her. Please, she begged silently, but still didn’t lower her guard.

“For the night only,” he rasped. She couldn’t fool herself enough to imagine there was anything remotely inviting in his tone or in his eyes. He melted into the shadows once again, this time leaving the door open. It seemed a yawning black maw, open and waiting for her to enter at her own peril.

A chill of apprehension rippled down her spine and for some unknown reason her limbs felt oddly languorous. Her knees shook and her heart thundered every bit as loudly as the rumble in the sky had earlier, and yet Melanie managed to force herself to cross that ebony threshold. Somehow the very crossing had taken on a significance of its own—brides were carried across thresholds; in some countries it was considered bad luck to talk across that strip separating the inside from the outside.

And now, on what seemed to her the very edge of the earth, she had crossed of her own accord, entered the dark domain of a man of rare power, of raw force. She had the prickling sensation of destiny taking over, of having willingly entered the twisted home of something—someone—who lived outside the laws of man, outside the governance of society.

Dear God, what was she doing here? Why had she insisted that he take her in? This was madness, insanity. This had to be worse than the PRI. But nothing could be worse than that. Could it?

The door shut behind her with a loud thud, and she knew an atavistic fear of being trapped within these thick rock walls, locked in with a stranger whose very touch granted life or could strip it away. She grasped Chris’s rounded little shoulder and held him tightly against her, as if by protecting him she could ward off danger altogether.

The windowless hallway was too night-darkened to grant her vision and she felt suddenly light-headed. When he spoke, she was unable to control her start.

“You should have listened to me,” he said. Disembodied, his voice no longer seemed harsh from disuse but rather as though it came from someplace deep inside him or from the very walls of his home. It was low and carried a note of warning, of promises long broken, of bitter disbelief and harsh resignation to the fates that guided him. In the dark, he seemed much less a man than a vehicle for the odd power he carried inside him.

She couldn’t see him at all, but felt his eyes upon her though she knew it was impossible. Even Teo Sandoval couldn’t see in the dark. Or could he? She could feel him, inches from her, so close she could smell his heady mountain scent, warm herself from the heat radiating off his body.

Was he waiting for her to say something? How could she speak when she couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t gauge his reaction?

“You leave at first light,” he said.

“My car is stuck in the mud,” she replied quickly, as if this were argument enough for her to stay.

“Pablo will help you get it out. I’m sure he’s the fool who sent you up here. I’ll deal with him later.”

“Oh, no,” she said, but his silence made a mockery of her protesting lie. “I—Don’t be angry with him.”

“If I am, señora, it has nothing to do with you.”

Melanie didn’t know what to say to this. If he was angry at the gas station attendant, Pablo, then she’d placed the man in grave danger. For Teo Sandoval was capable of doing anything. The time he’d been angry at the PRI, an entire scientific wing of a building had been smashed to bits.

“Please,” she said again, although this time she wasn’t quite certain what she was asking of him.

“At first light, señora,” he said, somehow giving the formal title a derisive intonation that she’d never heard given it before. Suddenly it was a threat and a promise at the same time. Not only that, but the tenor of his voice had changed as he spoke. His rasped voice seemed a caress now, and there was something else, some primal question laced in it that seemed torn from him against his will.

Though her heart still hammered in her breast, the pounding now had nothing to do with fear of the night, fear of the rock cave that seemed to spill down a cliff side. Now all her fear was of the man beside her in the dark and it stole her breath and made her legs feel weak and insubstantial.